Exploring Europa With Tiny Spacecraft

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Swarm of Tiny Spacecraft to Explore Europa’s Surface with Rapid Response

A small spacecraft carrying a swarm of “chipsats” the size of postage stamps could someday explore Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa. NASA has funded early development of the unusual mission idea as it looks toward future space exploration of planets and moons that may contain both water and extraterrestrial life.

The Europa mission proposal aims to create a gravitational map of the moon’s icy surface that many researchers suspect hides an alien ocean beneath. That map would then allow the mission’s “mothership” - a cubesat the size of several Rubik’s cubes stuck together — to deploy possibly hundreds of tiny chipsats to regions of Europa’s surface where liquid water is coming out. The “two missions in one” concept - using cheap, expendable chipsats that represent tiny spacecraft-on-a-chip systems - could allow the mission to react quickly to new events happening on Europa’s surface, unlike more expensive missions sent to the moon and Mars in the past that just carried one large lander or robotic rover.

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[Taun]

Just had an interesting idea Waspie... (probably already thought out by others, but is new for me)...

Could they build "chipsats" to be telescopic in nature (either radio wave or visual), then launch a few thousand of them to a stable point in space (say - a Lagrange point) - spread them out over

hundreds of miles/kilometers and in effect have a super massive "eye in the sky" - a "super Hubble"?

Getting them to point in the same direction might be tricky, and getting superior resolution might also.. But could it work?

Edited October 2, 2014 by Taun

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Getting them to point in the same direction might be tricky, and getting superior resolution might also.. But could it work?

Getting thousands of tiny objects to fly in such a precise manner would be more than tricky. You don't just need them to be pointing in the right direction, they would need to be flying at the correct distance apart with astonishing precision. Remember the imperfection in the primary mirror that nearly ruined the Hubble Space Telescope? That imperfection was about 1/5 the thickness of a human hair.

Small satellites are much more susceptible to effects such as solar wind and pressure of light that will move them out of alignment. They also, by the very fact they are tiny, have limited space for the fuel need to manoeuvre them to keep in the correct alignment.

I wouldn't say that what you propose is impossible, but it is extraordinarily difficult.