With today’s launch of Europa Clipper, it’s interesting to wonder why there seem to be no mission concepts of drilling into the ice. Online discussions (including on this sub) suggest that it’s a technological / engineering problem.
Let us assume that the existence of a subsurface ocean is confirmed (by the Clipper, or the ESA mission). What technological advance and/or engineering achievement would be needed in order to directly sample the ocean?
Edit: By “sample the ocean” I mean a lander that drills down the entire ice layer and deploys a submersible robotic craft (or at least an instrument) directly into the ocean: which can then directly sample / scan the ocean for existence of life.
Edit2: linking a video someone shared below, that has JPL discuss an amazing set of concepts that NASA has indeed been thinking about, parts of which are referenced many in the comments: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dGJc6wiiHyE&t=1267s&pp=2AHzCZACAQ%3D%3D
What technological advance would it take to drill into Europa’s ocean?
byu/curiousinquirer007 inspace
25 Comments
They had been working on a lander but got canceling. Europa is a very very harsh environment, temps and radiation is really challenging.
Also, need to know a bit more about the surface and the depth of ice sheet to see where it’s best to dig.
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I would say that this advance is just happening in front of our eyes. Starship will allow to send more mass into deep space than ever. Free from mass constrains NASA and others should be able to build cheaper and more ambitious probes.
Look up what it takes to dig a super deep hole on Earth. We don’t have very many.
We could do it now. Unfortunately we’re spending our resources bashing each other’s heads in for the most mundane reasons.
We can send a giant radioactive core to melt the kms of ice, with an insanely long cable to connect to the surface to transmit anything from the depths of the ocean. Mind you the core would have to be extremely hot AND be able to generate electricity to also heat the cable
The most reasonable way of remotely burrowing through unknown kilometers of ice from a billion km away is not by drilling. It’s by melting. The waste heat from an RTG would be more than adequate to melt a temporary channel through the ice, propelled only by Europa’s gravity.
The technological issue then becomes how to deploy sensors once the underlying liquid is reached and how to relay data through 10s of kilometers of ice.
[Here’s one paper](https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/12949/129490P/Acoustics-and-RF-communication-through-deep-ice-for-application-to/10.1117/12.3023942.short)
I think one of the biggest challanges would be to not contaminate the eventually fragile Ecosystem that may be under the ice.
My question is how that could be prevented.
Here’s a white paper a few colleagues of mine put together on this a couple of years back. https://doi.org/10.3847/25c2cfeb.20b2d549
Their work continues with a project doing a slightly different variant (no RTG) to access the bottoms of glaciers and submerged lakes.
Sounds like a job for a rag tag group of oil drillers.
Burrowing isn’t really the problem* . The idea is to melt your way through.
*The assumption is that the ice is relatively pure. If it contains a lot of impurities (rocks/gravel) or large-ish cavities then that could stop any kind of burrowing module in its tracks.
The real problem is getting data back to the surface.
Towing/unspooling several kilometers of cable are an issue. Not just because of space constraints in the burrowing module but because ice can move and potentially cut the cable. If there’s a cavity and the module drops then that could also tear the cable.
Another idea is to periodically drop low frequency repeaters into the ice behind the module as it descends. However this has some major mechanical/reliability issues with the dropping mechanism…and, of course, you would need each of those repeaters to be powered somehow. As above this poses space challenges because you need a fair few of these repeaters (several dozen) – and none of them are allowed to fail or the transmission link is broken.
Just maybe we shouldn’t. We seem to have gotten into a mindset that wherever there is water we absolutely have to explore, because it would somehow transcend our understanding of the universe if we found life.
It wouldn’t. It would simply confirm our assumptions, which are a variation of the Copernican Principle. We shouldn’t assume we are special, no matter how special our circumstances may seem.
Finding two sources of life in our tiny backyard is not as statistically significant as we seem to believe.
Maybe we should continue to test our assumptions with less impactful experiments?
Lasers have been used to drill into glaciers and rock on Earth. However its not cost effective for rock on Earth yet. Engineers are still working on that.
The Clipper is being run off of solar energy which is 1/24 as strong at Jupiter’s distance from the Sun than Earth. Jupiter is about the furthest distance a probe would use solar instead of nuclear generators. I’d guess you might want nuclear for the power demands of drilling. NASA/USA only has enough plutonium for a handful of space probes and is stingy about using nuclear power.
Seems to me like it would be a lot easier flying a probe through several geysers, collecting the water and returning this back to earth. No risk of contamination either.
The ocean on Europa is under 15 to 25km of ice. The deepest we have drilled in earth is just over 12km.
Ice is probably easier to drill through but still requires a lot of bulky equipment to drill that far.
A means of transmitting the information through any potentially bored hole through the ice.
You’d need kilometres of cable. No useable signal is punching through there.
There is a mission concept in this video: [Europa and Beyond: A Deep Dive into Ocean Worlds in Our Solar System](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGJc6wiiHyE)
What if we just design an insane combination between a rod from god and an armor piercing round?
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|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
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|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1g40adt/stub/lrzvz5y “Last usage”)|European Space Agency|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1g40adt/stub/ls1hfem “Last usage”)|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1g40adt/stub/ls106vo “Last usage”)|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[RTG](/r/Space/comments/1g40adt/stub/ls10ib6 “Last usage”)|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1g40adt/stub/ls0v0tr “Last usage”)|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SoI](/r/Space/comments/1g40adt/stub/ls0xv5r “Last usage”)|Saturnian Orbital Insertion maneuver|
| |Sphere of Influence|
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Drilling through 20km of ice would be extremely difficult even on Earth, imagine a billion miles away.
Only feasible option is melting a hole.
Problem is to melt through that much ice, and ice THAT cold you’d need something at the level of a fusion reactor to power the whole thing.
I’ve seen conceptual designs (on a documentary, I forget exactly how long ago) for a robot that can melt through however much ice it has to to get down there. However, once it’s down there how do we get signal back out through kilometers of ice?
You can’t answer that question without knowing how deep the ocean is
The answer could be as simple as a shovel to an oil rig
Power. You’re going to need lots of power. And heavy duty equipment with extremely high reliability with plenty of redundancy designed to operate in conditions far worse than anything on Earth.
So, you’re going to need either a fission or fusion power plant designed to work in space and you’re going to need some advances in metallurgy.
Off topic but this would make for a fun survival style game. In the style of Lethal Company maybe