More! and Better! Unmanned space exploration

Spinning off from another thread.

Space exploration threads tend to spiral down into the "oh we could have put men on Mars by now" manned space exploration / colonization attractor. Let's try to avoid that.

Assume instead that with a [handwave] POD around 1970, humanity decides to roughly double its budget for *unmanned* space exploration. What would we have by now?

Possibilities:

-- a balloon probe drifting in the atmosphere of Jupiter
-- a powered zeppelin in the atmosphere of Venus
-- a lander on at least one moon of Jupiter, probably Europa
-- rovers all over the Moon; in particular, rovers examining the volatile deposits and other interesting stuff at the poles
-- a couple of Mercury orbiters; possibly a Mercury lander
-- Pluto flyby already (OTL en route with a 2015 ETA)
-- A close (<0.25 au) solar orbiter (OTL planned for 2015 launch)
-- a solar polar orbiter (inclination >45 degrees)
-- Galileo / Cassini-style missions to Uranus and possibly Neptune

In terms of drive technologies:

-- widespread use of ion drives for missions to the outer solar system
-- solar sails past the prototype stage
-- tether for LEO / HEO orbital momentum transfer in the planning stage


Things I don't think we would plausibly have seen by now: sample returns from the outer solar system, rovers outside the orbit of Jupiter, a rover on the surface of Venus, widespread use of solar sails, actual deployment of a working tether.

Thoughts?


Doug M.
 
Spinning off from another thread.

Space exploration threads tend to spiral down into the "oh we could have put men on Mars by now" manned space exploration / colonization attractor. Let's try to avoid that.

Assume instead that with a [handwave] POD around 1970, humanity decides to roughly double its budget for *unmanned* space exploration. What would we have by now?

This is an excellent and fresh idea and once I tried to write a TL along those lines. The POD was with Eisenhower ordering the newly found NASA to concentrate on useful, ie. unmanned, missions in order to produce some kind of "Rockets for Peace" program. As benefits of space assets tend to be global they would have excellent propaganda value. Additionally, due to lag in electronics Soviets would have no hope to catch the US missions.
 

Nebogipfel

Monthly Donor
More possibilities -

-Various STARDUST like missions to collect all kinds of dust material (not only comets, but also e.g. dust in the Jupiter or Saturn systems). Maybe in connection with Deep Impact style impactors.
-More space based telescopes
-Sample return from asteroids

Generally, our konwledge of our (and other) solar systems could be at least a decade ahead.

Microanalytical techniques would be probably significantly ahead due to a constant stream of return samples :D.
 
What I would want to see is control satellites launched to Mars and other locations. I.e. Currently we have a weather satellite noticing a dust storm on Mars that might threaten a surface probe, relaying that data back to Earth, getting the data to the rover controller, and having it prep for storm.

The control satellite would notice storm data in the region where the probe is recorded, pass the alert to the rover, and send its own transmission of its actions back to Earth.

When additional satellites are launched, it will have the capability of monitoring their transmissions, and sending them the necessary data/instructions (when allowed). When a new surface probe is set to land, it would use existing satellites to monitor its descent, for after-crash analysis.

Of course, this would require a bit of fancy programming, technology, and pattern recognition.
 
Ion Thrusters? Electrostatic or Electromagnetic? I think electromagnetic has a heck of a lot more potential, but electrostatic is more doable in the short run.

Also, how are these ionic drive powered probes supposed to get off the ground? Unless they are launched from orbit, or transferred there, those drives could never make it off Earth, which would in turn mean that to launch the probes would need to be attached to a rocket for launch, at great cost.
I think the difficulty of launching non-reaction engine spaceships is a strong argument in favor of either a large manned space station, or even a moon base because of the relative ease of launching interplanetary ships/probes from orbit, or even off planet. Or the construction of a massive rail gun.
 
Also, how are these ionic drive powered probes supposed to get off the ground? Unless they are launched from orbit, or transferred there, those drives could never make it off Earth, which would in turn mean that to launch the probes would need to be attached to a rocket for launch, at great cost.

Google "Dawn probe" or "Dawn spacecraft". It was launched into orbit by a Delta II rocket in September 2007. After that the ion engines took over; they've been running almost nonstop since.

Dawn is actually a fairly cheap mission, as these things go: it cost under $400 million. And if it does everything it's supposed to (visit Vesta, hang out there for a year, then fly off to become an orbiter around Ceres) the scientific payoff should be significant.

In the ATL, I could imagine ion engines being developed maybe a decade earlier? In which case the Dawn-analog would have completed its mission in the early 2000s, and we'd have several successors in the air by now.


Doug M.
 
I doubt we'd have a rover on Europa. The interesting stuff is beneath several miles of ice, no?
 
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