This would revolutionize space exploration. It would allow massively parallel data gathering.
2 thoughts on “Million-Dollar Planetary Missions”
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This would revolutionize space exploration. It would allow massively parallel data gathering.
Comments are closed.
The thruster is cute, but I don’t think it’ll be powering any $1 million interplanetary missions to Europa to look for life, simply because of size and power constraints. A probe that could accomplish such a mission would need a high gain antenna and large power source.
NASA’s Juno mission is the first to the outer planets that will try to use solar cells, and its 635 square feet of panels weigh over 700 pounds, yet they will generate only about 250 Watts of useful electrical power for onboard systems and about 200 Watts for heating. That’s an output of about 7 Watts per square meter, and the solar cells won’t last long in Jupiter’s radiation environment. To survive that environment, Juno’s control and communications equipment weigh about 500 pounds because they have to be shielded.
Cube sats might be very useful closer in, though.
All good points George. In addition I’ll add that transiting the Van Allen belts via low thrust orbit rising incurs a huge dose both to the electronics and arrays. For the later that means 10-20% loss in efficiency. A direct Earth escape via the booster reduces the dose dramatically at the cost of a much larger (more expensive) launch vehicle. Once outside the Van Allen belts the radiation story doesn’t get much better. The bottom line is that cube sat electronics can’t survive beyond LEO for very long. Having studied small sats a little I have come to believe that cube sats aren’t good for much more than expensive high school and college science experiments. It’s not all negative though, I think that spacecraft in the 75-300kg range show some real promise for many missions in LEO, GEO and beyond. I’d love to see the super expensive, super heavy, can’t fail under any circumstances, old style spacecraft slowly replaced by this much smaller class of spacecraft.