I'm really exited about Dragonfly, as Titan is a world not too different from ours: it gas lakes and rivers (made out of hydrocarbons, like methane), dunes and mountains
tagami 12 hours ago [-]
Europa clipper launched 2 years ago arrives in 2030. DAVINCI, a Venusian probe, is slated net 2033
GolfPopper 5 hours ago [-]
BepiColombo, another joint ESA-JAXA mission, will enter orbit around Mercury next month after a longer-than-expected journey. It will be the third spacecraft to visit Mercury.
There might be others, those are just what I found in a quick search.
hn_submit 8 hours ago [-]
I suggest Terraforming Venus with microbes or extremophiles.
And to hell with the "planetary protection" treaty. We need "lebensraum"! Our females want to breed!
kridsdale1 4 hours ago [-]
Venus needs men!
hparadiz 10 hours ago [-]
Sample return from Venus is practically impossible with our current tech.
TGower 13 hours ago [-]
JAXA does great work, they also publish the highest resolution open access global surface elevation model. Really impressive for a country with about 1/10th the GDP of the US.
a3w 9 hours ago [-]
Bringing Protomolecule to earth, when?
(Minor spoilers for The Expanse, word Protomolecule means something there.)
I wonder how this mission compares in scale to the JAXA Hayabusa comet interceptor done twenty years ago.
johnea 9 hours ago [-]
This is good space science.
Unlike iPhone selfies around the moon, or golf on mars.
Manned space missions are very rarely justified in the modern era.
An unmanned probe doing science for 20 years, or a one shot influenza photo op.
The cost is about the same...
fooker 31 minutes ago [-]
It is important to get people excited about science, and inspire the next generation of scientists rather than choose the cheapest path to ‘good science’.
Without public support, you’ll soon find yourself without any funding. This pretty much explains NASA’s dire funding situation over the last thirty or so years.
You can only get so many people excited about weather balloons and space rock chemistry.
dyauspitr 6 hours ago [-]
> Manned space missions are very rarely justified in the modern era.
Unless you want to be interplanetary
manquer 5 hours ago [-]
Depends on your definition of you .
If it means life , then We don’t need humans to make life interplanetary at all; that is least efficient way to go about it ; we should instead design/choose lifeforms that are most likely to survive the target environment not depend on brittle/expensive life support technology to spread life through the system.
If the you is intelligence , then spreading AI could be a better approach rather than humans who are unlikely to be able evolve to survive in a hostile environment naturally anytime soon.
Humans in our current form in space is always going to expensive tourism no matter how much science fiction likes to pretend otherwise .
Venus and Europa could use some attention. Anything underway?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BepiColombo
For Europa, Europa Clipper Mission (already on the way): https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/mission-time...
... and JUICE (already on the way): https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice
There might be others, those are just what I found in a quick search.
And to hell with the "planetary protection" treaty. We need "lebensraum"! Our females want to breed!
(Minor spoilers for The Expanse, word Protomolecule means something there.)
Unlike iPhone selfies around the moon, or golf on mars.
Manned space missions are very rarely justified in the modern era.
An unmanned probe doing science for 20 years, or a one shot influenza photo op.
The cost is about the same...
Without public support, you’ll soon find yourself without any funding. This pretty much explains NASA’s dire funding situation over the last thirty or so years.
You can only get so many people excited about weather balloons and space rock chemistry.
Unless you want to be interplanetary
If it means life , then We don’t need humans to make life interplanetary at all; that is least efficient way to go about it ; we should instead design/choose lifeforms that are most likely to survive the target environment not depend on brittle/expensive life support technology to spread life through the system.
If the you is intelligence , then spreading AI could be a better approach rather than humans who are unlikely to be able evolve to survive in a hostile environment naturally anytime soon.
Humans in our current form in space is always going to expensive tourism no matter how much science fiction likes to pretend otherwise .