Pat Flannery wrote in message ...
Jonathan Silverlight wrote:


I hope the orbiter is built as soon as possible (with, just possibly,
the ability to do the Jupiter atmosphere work Galileo couldn't) but
they don't yet have a safe method of breaking into Lake Vostok, which
is a lot closer to home.

I figured out how to do this years ago; the lander carries a probe with
a fiber optic cable wrapped around a spool inside of it; on the nose of
the probe is mounted a radioisotope heat source. The probe is released,
and under it's own weight begins melting its way through the moon's ice
covering, laying out the fiber optic cable as it goes.. the water
refreezes above it, but it keeps moving constantly downwards until
hopefully it reaches the water layer...

Hot damn; my own totally non-expert, non-engineer, totally
layman-enthusiast sensibility tells me this is a fiendishly elegant
and workable idea. Bonus: however much radioactive material it takes
to run the RTG, removed from the Earth and out of the hands of kooks
like OBL, SH, and GWB and placed into the service of Science just
can't be bad.

Still, this raises the question: should our designers be thinking in
terms of the "traditional" surface-landing/sampling planetary probe,
or perhaps a hybrid submersible?

Talk about the mother of all Jacques Cousteau TV Specials...

--
"All over, people changing their roles,
along with their overcoats;
if Adolf Hitler flew in today,
they'd send a limousine anyway!" --the clash.
__________________________________________________ _____________
Mike Flugennock, the Sinkers, flugennock at sinkers dot org
Mike Flugennock's Mikey'zine, http://www.sinkers.org