Galileo End of Mission Status

"OM" om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote
in message ...
On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 15:43:48 -0400, Rick DeNatale
wrote:

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 16:22:15 +0000, Henry Spencer wrote:

I don't believe NASA has claimed that Galileo originated the idea

For all it's merits, I don't think that Galileo had enough on-board
intelligence to originate any ideas.

..."Shall. We. Play. A. Game?"

On the other hand, maybe it did, and the real reason they crashed it into
Jupiter was to avoid it getting a wild hare and coming back like V'ger in
Star Trek: The Motion Picture! G

"Gallo is that which seeks the Creator."

"Fascinating. Captain, why would a brand of Earth wine be looking for
its creator?"

...or:

"G'ili is that which seeks the Creator."

From here it became

Gigli is that which seeks its actors... in order to toss THEM into Jupiter.

As one reviewer said, "With Gigli, Ben and Jen finally have time along
together since no one else will be in the theater."



"I see. Where is Weird and the rest of the Spiders from Mars, then?"


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

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

Jonathan Silverlight wrote:


This should really be in sci..space.tech or sci.astro, but doesn't
some of the evidence for a fairly thin ice layer on Europa come from
the fact that it's all broken up, as though the individual icebergs
move relative to each other? There's a _lot_ of tidal strain keeping
things moving.

I don't think NASA spotted any movement during Galileo's mission, as
that would have been big news, and clinched the case for the water
layer...and there are _some_ meteor craters on the moon, so the surface
isn't getting remade on anything like a yearly basis.
Pat

In message , Pat Flannery
writes


Jonathan Silverlight wrote:


This should really be in sci..space.tech or sci.astro, but doesn't
some of the evidence for a fairly thin ice layer on Europa come from
the fact that it's all broken up, as though the individual icebergs
move relative to each other? There's a _lot_ of tidal strain keeping
things moving.

I don't think NASA spotted any movement during Galileo's mission, as
that would have been big news, and clinched the case for the water
layer...and there are _some_ meteor craters on the moon, so the surface
isn't getting remade on anything like a yearly basis.
Pat

Maybe, but you'd only need movement of a few feet (inches ?) to snap
the cable. Europa's tides are apparently 500 meters high.

http://uanews.opi.arizona.edu/cgi-bi...a/wa/SRStoryDe
tails?ArticleID=4950

I would love to see the Europa deep probe, and I hope it will occur
sometime this century unless they contaminate Lake Vostok & put the
whole idea on ice, but I think it will be a huge undertaking and
probably use an autonomous drill, with no direct link to the surface.
--
"Forty millions of miles it was from us, more than forty millions of miles of
void"
Remove spam and invalid from address to reply.

Mike Flugennock wrote:


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?

The trick is getting the data from the probe back up through the ice; a
really ambitious project would send down an autonomously running
submarine probe with the radio isotope power supply/ice melter on the
nose, let it swim around down there for a week or two, then have it drop
ballast and melt it's way back up again to the surface- where it deploys
an antennae and transmits its data back. This approach alleviates the
possibly shifting ice damaging the fiber optic cable problem.
Something that can accomplish this is probably going to be very heavy to
launch, and this may be a good one to assemble in Earth orbit at the ISS
from component parts and rocket boosters.

Pat

(Henry Spencer) wrote in message ...
In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
You know NASA keeps claiming that Galileo was responsible for the
subsurface ocean on Europa idea; this is not the case...the first time
that good images of Europa were received from the Voyager probes, its
relatively crater free surface was noticed and speculation started on it
having a subsurface ocean.

Believe it or not, speculation about a subsurface ocean in Europa started
*before* the Voyager images. If (dim) memory serves, the same guys who
predicted volcanic activity on Io had a paper in press at the time of the
Voyager encounter, suggesting that tidal heating might produce an internal
ocean in Europa.

The waters within the Galileans even predates Pearle, Yoder and
Cassen's predictions on tidal heating. In the mid seventies an
undergraduate project/masters thesis by Guy Consolmagno demonstrated
that radioactivity was enough to cause interior melting.

Interesting, Cassen et al was forced to do a partial recall of the
Europa work soon after Voyager- there appears to be a very strong
positive feedback between shell thickness and tidal heating, so if
Europa's ocean ever started to freeze over, in theory you would never
get the ocean back.

Whether the ocean penetrates the shell is very controversial - the
Europa session at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference is always
good for a fight these days. There is a strongly polarized division
into "thin-icers" who think the fractures go all the way to the
ice-liquid interface and the we a seeing a surface in geological
equilibrium; and "thick-icers" who say you can get most of the geology
through solid state convection of an unbreached ice crust over an
ocean, and that we are seeing a progression in geological style over
time. The astrobiologists prefer the first, the traditional geological
mapping crowd prefer the second; I think they are talking past each
other.

At the end of one particularly testy session a couple of years back, a
third party stood up and asked the main "thin-icer" and the main
"thick-icer" how thick they thought the shell actually was; both said
about 20 kilometers.

Which goes to show how important semantics are in a data limited
environment.

Bring on JIMO! (Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter; not Oberg...)
Cheers,
Duncan

"Duncan Young" wrote in message
om...
Which goes to show how important semantics are in a data limited
environment.
Wow! I've just *got* to slip that phrase into a discussion! g

Actually, a very interesting post, thanks.

Sally

"Andrew Gray" wrote in message
. ..
In article , Ron Baalke wrote:

"We learned mind-boggling things. This mission was worth its weight
in gold," said Dr. Claudia Alexander, Galileo project manager.

Hmm... Galileo was 3,900kg or so; ~125,000 troy oz... forty-eight and a
quarter million dollars, unless my sums have lost a place or two. I
can't find a cost for Galileo offhand, but I think it certainly tops out
the gold standard comfortably ;-)

Yup - at 3.2B$ for Galileo , and only 48M$ for it's weight in gold, I'd
hope it was worth a great deal more than that

Doug

On Wed, 24 Sep 2003 01:00:11 -0700, Duncan Young wrote:

At the end of one particularly testy session a couple of years back, a
third party stood up and asked the main "thin-icer" and the main
"thick-icer" how thick they thought the shell actually was; both said
about 20 kilometers.

Which goes to show how important semantics are in a data limited
environment.

Which is why one of my pet peeves is when people try to shut off an
argument by saying something like, "it's just a question of semantics."

If the meaning of what someone is saying isn't important, what is?

In article , Rick DeNatale
writes
On Wed, 24 Sep 2003 01:00:11 -0700, Duncan Young wrote:

At the end of one particularly testy session a couple of years back, a
third party stood up and asked the main "thin-icer" and the main
"thick-icer" how thick they thought the shell actually was; both said
about 20 kilometers.

Which goes to show how important semantics are in a data limited
environment.

Which is why one of my pet peeves is when people try to shut off an
argument by saying something like, "it's just a question of semantics."

If the meaning of what someone is saying isn't important, what is?

Since you ask, it is the significance of the meaning - is it good
science for example? Is it rational? Does it make sense?
--
Eric Crew