Crewed Mission to Callisto Using Advanced Plasma Propulsion Systems

Adams, Robert B.; Statham, G.; White, S.; Patton, Bradley D; Thio, Y. C. Francis; Alexander, Reginald; Fincher, S.; Polsgrove, Tara; Chapman, John S.; Hopkins, Randall C.

doi:10.2514/6.2003-4527

Cited by 2 publications

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“…As our spacecraft get more capable (Adams et al, 2003) , humans can also explore and even colonize Callisto, outermost of the Galilean moons of Jupiter (McGuire et al, 2003) .…”

Section: … and This Gray Spirit Yearning In Desirementioning

confidence: 99%

NASA must protect Earth's biosphere even if Mars samples hold mirror life – motivating planetary protection with new scenarios like mirror life - survey of recent research relevant to a Mars sample return - and how to keep Earth's biosphere 100% safe with a miniature telerobotic lab above GEO, and protect other biospheres 100% with sterile robotic explorers

Walker¹

2023

Preprint

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In the late 2020s to 2030s, China, and NASA / ESA and Japan plan to return samples from Mars. We need to keep Earth’s biosphere safe from any Martian microbes. Japan’s agency JAXA has the simplest mission, to return samples from the top few centimeters of Mars’s innermost moon Phobos. JAXA can safely return unsterilized samples without any precautions, because any microbes already withstood ejection from Mars, most recently, 700,000 years ago. Then on Phobos they were sterilized similarly to martian meteorites arriving at Earth today from that ancient impact.JAXA warned this meteorite argument is not valid for samples from the Martian surface. NASA’s draft EIS incorrectly says any life from Jezero crater can get here faster and better protected in a meteorite than in a sample tube. Surface dirt and dust can’t get here at all.NASA’s EIS also proposes to return its samples to a Biosafety Level 4 facility. However, the European Space Foundation study in 2012 set size limits well beyond capabilities of a BSL-4 and indeed beyond any current air filter capabilities.We can avoid all these issues and keep Earth 100% safe by sterilizing samples before they get here, with the equivalent of a few hundred million years of Mars surface ionizing radiation. This has virtually no effect on geology, while terrestrial contamination in Perseverance’s samples makes most astrobiology impossible.We can greatly increase science value with contamination free samples in a sterile container returned to a martian gravity centrifuge in an unmanned satellite above GEO, to start Sagan’s “vigorous program of unmanned exobiology”. This is a review of central results in planetary protection literature, with new worst case scenarios such as mirror life, to encourage space agencies to ensure Earth’s biosphere is adequately protected when they return samples from Mars.

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“…As our spacecraft get more capable (Adams et al, 2003) , humans can also explore and even colonize Callisto, outermost of the Galilean moons of Jupiter (McGuire et al, 2003) .…”

Section: … and This Gray Spirit Yearning In Desirementioning

confidence: 99%

NASA must protect Earth's biosphere even if Mars samples hold mirror life – motivating planetary protection with new scenarios like mirror life - survey of recent research relevant to a Mars sample return - and how to keep Earth's biosphere 100% safe with a miniature telerobotic lab above GEO, and protect other biospheres 100% with sterile robotic explorers

Walker¹

2023

Preprint

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“…Heat rejection has already been an issue for terrestrial supercomputers, the issue is aggravated in space, where heat can only be rejected without mass loss via radiation, requiring large surface areas facing towards free space. Advanced radiators could reject about 1kW t /kg thermal power per kilogram in the near future [2,88,93]. Consequently, about 100 tons of radiator mass would be required for rejecting 100MW and 1 ton for 1MW respectively.…”

Section: Design Of a Generic Artificial Intelligence Probementioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial Intelligence for Interstellar Travel

Hein,

Baxter

2018

Preprint

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The large distances involved in interstellar travel require a high degree of spacecraft autonomy, realized by artificial intelligence. The breadth of tasks artificial intelligence could perform on such spacecraft involves maintenance, data collection, designing and constructing an infrastructure using in-situ resources. Despite its importance, existing publications on artificial intelligence and interstellar travel are limited to cursory descriptions where little detail is given about the nature of the artificial intelligence. This article explores the role of artificial intelligence for interstellar travel by compiling use cases, exploring capabilities, and proposing typologies, system and mission architectures. Estimations for the required intelligence level for specific types of interstellar probes are given, along with potential system and mission architectures, covering those proposed in the literature but also presenting novel ones. Finally, a generic design for interstellar probes with an AI payload is proposed. Given current levels of increase in computational power, a spacecraft with a similar computational power as the human brain would have a mass from dozens to hundreds of tons in a 2050 -2060 timeframe. Given that the advent of the first interstellar missions and artificial general intelligence are estimated to be by the mid-21st century, a more in-depth exploration of the relationship between the two should be attempted, focusing on neglected areas such as protecting the artificial intelligence payload from radiation in interstellar space and the role of artificial intelligence in self-replication.

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Crewed Mission to Callisto Using Advanced Plasma Propulsion Systems

Cited by 2 publications

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Artificial Intelligence for Interstellar Travel

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