[extropy-chat] Gods of Mars was

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, bradbury wrote:

>On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 2:39am Alfio Puglisi <puglisi at arcetri.astro.it> wrote:
>
>> Venus indeed eats space probes for lunch. If I remember correctly, the
>> number of probes the Russian sent before having some success must be
>> measured in dozens.
>
>I would doubt it is that high, particularly if one counts probes
>that were intended to probe the atmosphere.

I looked at wikipedia.org, and almost all Venus probes are marked as
"success". But, again from my evidently faulty memory, most of those
probes survived maybe 20 minutes in the venusian environment. I guess it
can still be called "success"...

>
>[snip]
>
>> Except on Venus, where it will be melt and crushed by the atmosphere.
>
>Oh no Alfio -- you don't get off that easily.
>[...]
>can indeed be managed.  Landing on Mercury may be somewhat
>more difficult but that too can probably be done.  And of
>course there is an active discussion group of how to land
>on and penetrate into Europa.  Now if you want to raise
>difficult engineering problems they might be getting to the
>core of Saturn or Jupiter.  Such an effort might eat probes
>for lunch.  But since we want to dismantle them anyway there
>are alternate strategies for getting to the core.

Well, I'm happy that space tech is more advanced than I thought :-)

Ciao,
Alfio