Post by swamprat on Nov 14, 2017 17:52:15 GMT -6
Breakthrough Initiatives Wants to Launch a Private Mission to Enceladus
A private team may send a spacecraft to Saturn's watery moon before a space agency like NASA makes it happen.
By Jay Bennett
Nov 14, 2017
The two most exciting places in the solar system may be Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus. The watery worlds are widely considered the best bets to find extraterrestrial life. NASA is now building a spacecraft called Europa Clipper to launch to Jupiter's moon in the early 2020s. Enceladus, however, does not yet have its own mission on the books.
Yuri Milner wants to change that. The Russian billionaire venture capitalist and amateur physicist is the man behind the Breakthrough Starshot mission to send a nano-spacecraft to the closest star, Proxima Centauri, and an initiative called Breakthrough Listen to use powerful radio telescopes to search for signals from intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. Now Milner's Breakthrough Initiatives has set its sights on Enceladus.
"We formed a sort of little workshop around this idea: Can we design a low-cost, privately funded mission to Enceladus which can be launched relatively soon?" Milner said at an inaugural international space summit called "A New Space Age" put on by the Economist magazine in Seattle, as reported by Space.com. If Milner is serious about launching a spacecraft to Enceladus, it would be a historic feat as the first privately funded mission to the outer solar system. (If it launched today, it would be the very first private interplanetary mission at all.)
The Russian tech magnate went on to say he wanted a spacecraft "that can look more thoroughly at those plumes and try to see what's going there ahead of a more expensive mission that NASA is considering right now, which might take maybe 10 years to launch."
The plumes Milner mentioned are pockets of water vapor, ice, and other material that are ejected from Enceladus's subsurface ocean out into space by way of about 100 geysers near the south pole. Material from inside the moon that is trapped underneath roughly 10 to 20 miles (15 to 30 km) of icy crust is shot up to tens of thousands of feet above the surface, so a spacecraft could fly through the plumes to sample material from the interior without ever actually touching down on the moon. The recently deceased Cassini spacecraft did fly through these plumes, and while the craft did not have the proper instruments to search the material for larger molecules that could be indicative of life, it was able to determine that Enceladus likely has active hydrocarbon vents on the seafloor, filling the ocean with nutrients and heat.
In light of these findings, astrobiologists have been itching to go back to Enceladus to search for life since the end of the Cassini mission in September 2017. Milner mentioned a future NASA mission to the small moon, which was a reference to the New Frontiers program. NASA is currently considering 12 proposals for interplanetary missions under the program, and two of those proposals are for spacecraft to go back to Enceladus. The space agency is expected to cull the list before the end of the year and select one mission for funding in 2019.
Details about the Breakthrough Initiatives' proposed mission, such as a timeline or list of spacecraft instrumentation, are currently lacking. But given the vast resources of the organization, perhaps Yuri Milner and co. and can do something never done before—send a spacecraft beyond the asteroid belt without the help of a national government. And if they go, they will go in search of an answer to the most profound question in science: Is there life beyond Earth?
www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a13579385/breakthrough-initiatives-launch-private-mission-enceladus/
A private team may send a spacecraft to Saturn's watery moon before a space agency like NASA makes it happen.
By Jay Bennett
Nov 14, 2017
The two most exciting places in the solar system may be Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus. The watery worlds are widely considered the best bets to find extraterrestrial life. NASA is now building a spacecraft called Europa Clipper to launch to Jupiter's moon in the early 2020s. Enceladus, however, does not yet have its own mission on the books.
Yuri Milner wants to change that. The Russian billionaire venture capitalist and amateur physicist is the man behind the Breakthrough Starshot mission to send a nano-spacecraft to the closest star, Proxima Centauri, and an initiative called Breakthrough Listen to use powerful radio telescopes to search for signals from intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. Now Milner's Breakthrough Initiatives has set its sights on Enceladus.
"We formed a sort of little workshop around this idea: Can we design a low-cost, privately funded mission to Enceladus which can be launched relatively soon?" Milner said at an inaugural international space summit called "A New Space Age" put on by the Economist magazine in Seattle, as reported by Space.com. If Milner is serious about launching a spacecraft to Enceladus, it would be a historic feat as the first privately funded mission to the outer solar system. (If it launched today, it would be the very first private interplanetary mission at all.)
The Russian tech magnate went on to say he wanted a spacecraft "that can look more thoroughly at those plumes and try to see what's going there ahead of a more expensive mission that NASA is considering right now, which might take maybe 10 years to launch."
The plumes Milner mentioned are pockets of water vapor, ice, and other material that are ejected from Enceladus's subsurface ocean out into space by way of about 100 geysers near the south pole. Material from inside the moon that is trapped underneath roughly 10 to 20 miles (15 to 30 km) of icy crust is shot up to tens of thousands of feet above the surface, so a spacecraft could fly through the plumes to sample material from the interior without ever actually touching down on the moon. The recently deceased Cassini spacecraft did fly through these plumes, and while the craft did not have the proper instruments to search the material for larger molecules that could be indicative of life, it was able to determine that Enceladus likely has active hydrocarbon vents on the seafloor, filling the ocean with nutrients and heat.
In light of these findings, astrobiologists have been itching to go back to Enceladus to search for life since the end of the Cassini mission in September 2017. Milner mentioned a future NASA mission to the small moon, which was a reference to the New Frontiers program. NASA is currently considering 12 proposals for interplanetary missions under the program, and two of those proposals are for spacecraft to go back to Enceladus. The space agency is expected to cull the list before the end of the year and select one mission for funding in 2019.
Details about the Breakthrough Initiatives' proposed mission, such as a timeline or list of spacecraft instrumentation, are currently lacking. But given the vast resources of the organization, perhaps Yuri Milner and co. and can do something never done before—send a spacecraft beyond the asteroid belt without the help of a national government. And if they go, they will go in search of an answer to the most profound question in science: Is there life beyond Earth?
www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a13579385/breakthrough-initiatives-launch-private-mission-enceladus/