/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11838631
this thread is direct saturn edition, which is far away from earth.
>>11838637
>>radioisotope
Nah, what you really want are nuclear reactors. Uranium is MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper than radioisotopes. Plutonium production is still very limited right now. Although radioisotopes don't need to be kept on a long stick like reactors do. Neutron's fuck electronics up.
>>11838647
not very. A simple control loop can keep the antenna pointed at a source. Woop de fucking do. As far as I can tell, space probes can't even navigate on their own, they are basically remote controlled from earth. I consider them to be less alive than self driving cars.

>>Robotic Jovian observatories when
now stalker, ever heard of Juno

Let's all take a moment to remember the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. Back in the early 2000s NASA wanted to send a nuclear powered space battleship to study Jupiter's icy moons. It was going to have a small fission reactor that made electricity with turbines providing 200 KW of electric power. That's more power than the ISS generates with its solar panels. This powered some big ion engines and a full scale ice penetrating radar. In addition because they had so much power available they could transmit data back to earth faster. Because it had so much delta V it could have explored Ganymeade, Callisto, Europa, and even other moons like Io when their orbit was favorable. Oh and it was gonna drop a lander on Europa. The main thing about it was they started developing a high power fission reactor to power the damn thing. A reactor outputting more power than the ISS would have had applications outside of a Europa mission. The whole project got cancelled when Bush wanted to return to the Moon. That went nowhere and leftovers from that program became the SLS we have today.