Talia’s Top Five: Space Mission Wish List

Image

Last week I mentioned that an ice giant mission is in the top five of my personal wish list of missions I would love to see developed, and it gave me the idea for this week’s post. There are a lot of intriguing places we could send spacecraft and I, as humans tend to, have opinions about which ones I’d most love to see happen.

So I’m going to take this week to fantasize about the space missions I’d most love to see become real, focusing specifically on missions to visit other places within our solar system, rather than, say, future space observatories. To do so I’m going to pretend I live in an imaginary world where money (and therefore things like power sources, launch vehicle sizes, and other normal mission development snags) is no object and the only thing standing in the way of my imaginary missions are the laws of physics. Even I can’t argue with the laws of physics.

Enceladus

The order in which I’d prioritize these missions being developed if I ruled the world changes from day to day, depending on what shiny space thing has captured my attention, but I don’t think an Enceladus mission ever gets knocked out of the top spot. I want this one bad.

In my personal, humble, not at all biased (yeah right) opinion, there is nowhere in our solar system as intriguing as Enceladus. This moon of Saturn is one of several ocean moons in the outer solar system—gas giant moons where tidal forces from the gravity of the big planets heats the moons’ interiors up enough for there to be layers of liquid water under their surfaces.

Obviously water is a key ingredient for life as we know it, but it’s not the only thing. I don’t know about you, but I don’t live on liquid water alone. And we think that a lot of these moon oceans lack other essential ingredients for life and would be sterile. Two big exceptions to this are (we think, maybe, possibly) Europa and Enceladus. And of the two, Enceladus is the one I want to visit the most.

Don’t get me wrong, Europa is very, very intriguing, and I’m absolutely delighted with the embarrassment of riches that are the multiple missions currently heading to the Jupiter system (hey JUICE! Hi Europa Clipper!) to learn more about the moons in general and Europa in particular. But there’s a lot we’re not going to be able to learn about Europa that we could learn about Enceladus.

Image

Both moons have thick ice crusts, but Europa’s is (we think) much thicker than Enceladus’s, making determinations about its underground ocean harder. Plus, Enceladus is doing us the big favor of spitting parts of its ocean out into space via geysers. The Cassini spacecraft (RIP my beloved) was able to sample those geysers directly, and determine they were coming from an ocean, but Cassini wasn’t actually designed to be sampling moon geysers. Heck, we weren’t even sure the geysers were real until Cassini got there.

So now imagine a spacecraft that had been specifically designed with a full examination of Enceladus in mind, including detailed sampling analysis of the geysers. What sorts of things might those samples uncover? Solid evidence of hydrothermal energy sources on the ocean floor? A final say on whether the ocean does contain all the ingredients for life as we know it? Plankton??

Thus far Enceladus is the only ocean moon we see providing us with such easy access to its watery depths, as well as being one of the more likely places in the solar system to support life. So the real question is whyhaven’t we gone there yet? At least the European Space Agency has announced the intention to build an Enceladus mission—although we’d have to wait all the way until 2050 for it (insert Talia grumpy face here).

Ice Giants

Image

Our explorations of Uranus and Neptune, the solar systems ice giants (so-called because it seems likely that a huge part of their makeup is icy particles, quite distinct from, say, Jupiter or Saturn) has been pretty sad thus far. We sent Voyager 2 flying by them once, in the 1980s. Apart from that all our observations have been from Earth which is, on average, 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion km) away for Uranus and 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion km) away for Neptune.

Which is a nice way of saying there is so much we don’t know about these planets. We can’t even apply a bunch of the things we know about Jupiter and Saturn to them, because they really are a different kind of beast. Their inner makeup is a mystery (are they actually rock giants? Magma giants?), there’s things going on with their magnetic fields we can’t explain, we don’t know what’s driving the insane winds we detect on Neptune or why Uranus is all the way over on its side or how many moons they’re hiding that we don’t know about.

And it’s not like these are little moons or obscure Kuiper Belt Objects! They’re PLANETS! Whole entire planets in our own solar system that we know very little about! Seriously, it’s embarrassing. In my perfect world where I control all of the purse strings they’d each get their own spacecraft, but at this point I’ll settle for a Uranus orbiter at the very least (it’s closer). And, as I pointed out last week, I’m not the only one. An ice giant mission has been atop many planetary scientists’ wish lists for decades. Because again, it’s embarrassing.

Mars Sample Return

This one feels like cheating a little bit, because this was a real mission, but now it appears to be…not. But sweet Carl Sagan do I want it to be! Waiting for us on the surface of Mars like a series of lightsabers discarded by a careless Jedi are a set of sample tubes collected by the Perseverance rover (and they really do look like lightsaber hilts). Perseverance specifically collected those tubes with the idea that one day they would be collected by a future spacecraft and returned to Earth for detailed analysis.

Image

But our ambitions proved too grand—or at least too ridiculously, eye-wateringly expensive. The mission architecture kept switching up (at one point there was going to be an Ingenuity-derived helicopter derived from Ingenuity—RIP my beloved—or possibly a series of fetch rovers, or possibly something else entirely) while the budget ballooned higher and higher. Estimates hit $11 billion. Even I can’t blame them for cancelling it when no real progress was being made and that budget number just kept going higher.

But I want it! Specifically I want the sample known as Sapphire Canyon. This sample was the subject of a lot of news stories (and a blog post) back in September because it contains certain minerals. Our most likely explanation for how those minerals in particular got there involves Martian biology, but it’s not the only possible explanation, and we’ve maxed out Perseverance’s ability to analyze the sample in situ. It needs to come home.

The most likely way to answer the question of whether there was ever life on Mars is sitting on a crater rim just waiting to be collected and we have no plans to collect it right now. I get mad about it on at least a weekly basis.

Venus Atmosphere

Longtime Spacing Out readers know I am a serious sucker for a good Venus story, and one of my favorite solar system theories is that life once existed on Venus and may still persist in some of the upper layers of the atmosphere. And I would love to find out if that theory is true.

Image

There are a series of Venus missions that may (or may not, budget issues have tripped some of them up) be happening in the near future, but none of them are quite what I’m looking for. The ESA’s EnVision and NASA’s VERITAS will be orbital craft. NASA’s DAVINCI and Rocket Lab’s Venus Life Finder will include descent probes (and Rocket Lab’s private craft even has the same goal as me), but they’ll be spending short amounts of time in the most interesting cloud layers.

Venus Life Finder might only need those few minutes to answer this question, but what I would love to see is something more along the lines of Northrop Grumman’s VAMP (Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform) concept. Essentially an inflatable aircraft that could spend long periods of time floating through the interesting part of Venus’s clouds, taking measurements over the course of months or even years, rather than a few minutes.

I swear, if the first place we ever find extraterrestrial life turns out to be Venus, you’ll hear me cackling all the way to Cape Cod.

Interstellar Comet Probe

This one is pretty pie-in-the-sky, but since I’m only limiting myself to the laws of physics there’s nothing to stop me wishing. We know now that our solar system is probably getting regular visits from interstellar comets like 3I/ATLAS. Some of these interstellar objects are awfully intriguing, like ATLAS, which may turn out to be a piece of the primordial Milky Way, or 1I/’Oumuamua, which looks more like a broken off piece of an extrasolar Pluto than a comet (then there’s 2I/Borisov which looked, well, pretty much like a normal comet).

Image

These are pieces of other solar systems that come to visit, and therefore represent extremely valuable research opportunities that we don’t get anywhere else. We’ve only found a few of these objects up until now, but with the on-lining of instruments like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory we’re expecting that detection rate to skyrocket.

If we can find one of these objects far enough out on its approach through the solar system, and if it’s taking the right kind of course that will make a spacecraft rendezvous even remotely possible, I would love to see us send something for an up-close look! This might require having a spacecraft ready to quickly load onto a rocket, or possibly even having a spacecraft already in space, standing by for the right opportunity.

But imagine if, when 3I/ATLAS came to town, we weren’t limited to spacecraft stretched across the solar system being temporarily press-ganged into service away from their primary missions, millions and millions of miles away from the comet. Imagine if we had a craft with even a few basic instruments that could get within a million miles of a piece of another solar system’s architecture. Imagine if we could even reach out and touch it, sample its vapors and drift through its dust tail, tasting the flavors of a whole ‘nother realm of the Milky Way.

Wouldn’t that be amazing??

Image

The Sky is Not the Limit

Will any of these ever come to fruition? I sure hope at least some will. There’s certainly the will, even if we don’t yet have the way. But after all, all space missions start off as a wish. So someday I might get to see at least a few of these wishes come true.

I’d say something here about wishing on a star, but who needs those gas bags when you’ve got a perfectly lovely series of planetary worlds to wish on instead?