Saturn Ring Sample Return Mission?

Craig Fink wrote:
In article ,
Craig Fink wrote:

A planetary probe should be able to fly in and sample Saturn's ring
material and analysis it and/or return a sample to Earth. The relative
velocity between the probe and ring material would be almost zero if the
probe is in-plane near circular.

Has anyone proposed or is working on a Saturn Ring Sample mission?


Herman Rubin wrote:


Assuming you had a big enough and complex enough vehicle
you could get to the neighborhood of Saturn and get the
vehicle into the same orbit as ring particles, getting the
piece of the ring particle might not be too difficult.

But it would have to be analyzed there. Returning it
to Earth in usable shape might be difficult for many
reasons, one of them being that the current estimate
of what the ring particles are come up with some sort
of water-ammonia ice, and even returning an empty
probe requires more energy than will be available.


An Aerobrake using Saturn's atmosphere to start the journey at the bottom
ring, a reasonable L/D could supply the plane change. And it could be used
at Earth with the returning samples...

Aerobraking at Saturn is a challenge. We are talking speeds greater than
35 km/s here. If you want to complicate this with a plane change using
aerodynamic lift then I think your heat shield is in sci-fi territory.
You might be able to do it with multiple passes where each orbital dip
in the atmosphere only takes away a little velocity and only changes the
plane a little. But that would take a lot of time (years) and would still
be technically challenging.


Alain Fournier