by 1970-01-01
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- >No spacecraft has ever landed in the outer solar system — except one: the Huygens probe,
Editors are asleep at spacedaily.com or have been replaced by a shitty AI. Rosetta landed on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in the outer solar system in 2015.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Rosett...
by chrononaut
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- Ah, what a perfect opportunity to link one of my favorite old Youtube videos, which is an animation of a significant amount of telemetry captured by Huygens as it landed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZC4u0clEc0
I always loved the presentation of the information.
by cucumber3732842
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- I remember listening to the landing on NPR(?) when it happened. There was no streaming back then and IDK what channel it would have been on if it was on TV at all. IIRC they brought someone special into the studio because they expected to need someone who was extra good at verbalizing visual things. It was very impressive at the time.
- It's partly because these missions take so long to pay off. The Jovian and Saturnian moons are definitely targets for landers, as is some of the asteroid belt. There is a significant signal delay as well, meaning nothing would be done in real time.
Martian rovers can have a twenty minute signal delay one way. Meaning a return signal takes over forty minutes. If it isn't behind the Sun. By the time probes get to Jupiter, the delay on a return signal can be the best part of two hours. That can increase even more going to and from Saturn.
Increase that by even more for Uranus and Neptune.
by jiggawatts
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- With new, lower-cost heavy lift capabilities coming online soon such as SpaceX Starhip it would make sense to explore the outer solar system with a mass manufactured probes.
So instead of designing totally bespoke multi-billion-dollar probes, build dozens of hundred-million dollar probes that leverage efficiencies of scale just like any other industrial product.
Send them to every outer planet, every moon, and every large asteroid like Ceres!
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