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Can a spaceship, say Musk's BFR, actually land on the ice surface of Titan, or Europa, or Enceladus?

It seems to me that the hot exhaust gases would make the surface melt where the rocket is trying to land, making it hard or impossible for it to stabilise on the surface. And even if it does land, the water would quickly freeze and imprison the rocket legs, making it hard or impossible for it to take off without expending too much energy.

I guess what's portrayed on the image, on Europa, is misleading...

BFR resting vertically on an icy surface with Jupiter in the background

thomasjestin
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    Those icy bodies are very cold, the atmosphere of Titan is dense, but the other moon's is very thin. Heat transfer is very low in a thin atmosphere, the ice will not melt. The ice may sublimate partially from solid to vapor directly. – Uwe May 02 '18 at 10:42
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    The exhaust gas is hotter then the melting point of many kinds of rock, or of the steel deck on the SpaceX drone ships. You rely on being quick enough not to heat the materials to their melting point. – Steve Linton May 02 '18 at 12:51
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    @SteveLinton most of these bodies are small to tiny so the thrust during such landing can be quite low – jkavalik May 02 '18 at 12:56
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    @SteveLinton The temperature is high in the combustion chamber, but because of the nozzle expansion, it can be surprisingly low at the exit plane of a vacuum-optimized engine. – Russell Borogove May 02 '18 at 16:30
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    Not sure about the BFR's engineering details, but the Lunar Excursion Module left its legs behind when it left the moon. You don't want to go back up with anything you don't need anymore. So it wouldn't have mattered if they'd frozen on to the surface... – Oscar Bravo May 03 '18 at 12:09
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    Larry Niven's 'World of Ptavvs' envisioned an explorer landing on Pluto with a fusion drive, igniting the frozen nitrogen with the frozen oxygen, and watching the whole planet burn up. – Christopher Hostage May 03 '18 at 15:56
  • Put throwaway covers on the landing shoes – K7AAY May 03 '18 at 21:30

2 Answers2

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Sorry for the length of this, but it brings up some interesting facts and possibilities.

The moons you mention, Titan, Europa, and Enceladus, are three very different places. Titan has a relatively large surface gravitational acceleration (as far as satellites go) and a very thick atmosphere; Europa has a relatively large surface gravitational acceleration and a very thin atmosphere; and Enceladus has a weak gravitational acceleration and a very thin atmosphere. This makes landing techniques different for the three.

At Titan the surface temperature is ~95 K (-180 C), and at the tropopause is ~77 K—really cold! And the surface atmospheric pressure is nearly 1.5 bars, for a mass density ~4 times that of Earth's. The gravitational acceleration is only ~1/7 of Earth's. I doubt that they would try to land on Titan with a BFR spaceship as currently envisioned. The cold, dense atmosphere makes for a tremendous convective cooling rate, so without prodigious heating many spacecraft parts would go below their allowable minimum temperatures, especially any exposed electronics and parts with lubricants. Handling the environment at Titan would require an extensive redesign. Titan's low gravity leads to a very large atmospheric scale height, the vertical distance over which the pressure changes by a factor of e. Couple that to the high surface pressure and you get an atmosphere that produces measurable aerodynamic drag nearly 1000 km above the surface (!), as Cassini and Huygens verified. When the hypersonic/supersonic deceleration phase is finished, there's still a long way to go to the surface, and that takes time. The Huygens probe took 2-1/2 hours to get down after opening its parachute, even with a change to a smaller 'chute on the way down. During that time the craft is exposed to even more intense convective cooling. That said, Titan's atmosphere and low gravity make aeronautics easy. It lets you glide most of the way down rather than having to burn precious propellants. As mentioned above, the duration of the part of the landing burn with the plumes impinging on the surface would be short enough that the amount of melting would be small. If the landing legs did indeed stick to the mostly-ice surface material, a quick blast of electrical or chemical heating on the pads would release them. There are all kinds of other options and issues to consider, such as: use of parachutes or a parafoil on the way down; use of a (really large!) balloon for the initial departure ascent so aerodynamic drag doesn't cost so much in ∆v; and use of rocket propulsion, or aerodynamics to land.

Europa's surface gravity is similar to Titan's, but its surface atmospheric pressure is 12 orders of magnitude smaller, so it's a vacuum landing. At such a low pressure the ice doesn't melt, it sublimates, going directly from solid to gas, so you can think of it as ablating. Again, the duration of the part of the landing burn with the plumes impinging on the surface would be short enough that the amount of ablation would be small. The main problem at Europa is the radiation intensity, far more intense (one to two orders of magnitude) than the Van Allen belts at Earth. The resolution of the image is too low for me to tell for sure, but it appears to show people (I assume in space suits!) with flashlights on the surface outside of the spacecraft. That's not going to happen! One other problem is the ∆V required for that mission, assuming it's not one-way. I suppose you could couple a cluster of big tanks to the BFR spaceship for the trip to Jupiter, Jupiter orbit insertion (maybe Ganymede and/or Callisto gravity assists helping there), pump-down to Europa approach (also with gravity assists), and Europa orbit insertion. Without the gravity assists the ∆V would be impossibly high, even with the auxiliary tanks. The tanks are separated and left in Europa orbit for the landing. Upon return from the surface the BFR would reconnect with the non-empty tanks for the flight back to Earth, necessarily involving more gravity assists. All this has to happen in a fairly short time or radiation spoils everything.

Enceladus is a much less demanding destination than Europa, except for doubling the heliocentric distance, which makes for long flight times (maybe in addition to the auxiliary propellant tanks you'd have some auxiliary food storage). The surface gravity is only 0.113 m/s^2, about 1/81 of Earth's, and the radiation is far more benign. Similar to the approach to Europa, upon arriving at Saturn and inserting into orbit (gravity assist or aerogravity assist from Titan?), you do a moderately ∆V-intensive pump-down to Enceladus approach and insertion into Enceladus orbit. But from there it's much easier: the total ∆V from a 100 km circular orbit to landing is only about 200 m/s. And the ice ablation situation is similar to that at Europa. Might Philae-style bouncing be a problem, landing in such low gravity with a big spacecraft? The south polar region is where all the action is, where the plumes are venting Enceladus's evaporated sea water into space, so that's the most attractive place to land. But with those plumes depositing thick layers of fluffy ice-grain material on the surface, it's hard to know what the surface topography is beneath the fluff, and that's a landing hazard.

This is a problem for all three destinations: finding the equivalent of a car parking lot to set down on. Titan would probably be the least risky in that regard, but you can't just set down anywhere. There are rugged mountain ranges, lakes and seas, river channels, etc. The only location where we know we could find a suitable landing spot is near the Huygens landing site. For Europa and Enceladus there are also rugged areas and other areas that look smooth and land-able at the resolution of the images we have. But the next level down in resolution might yield surprises, akin to what Armstrong and Aldrin found upon arriving at their Mare Tranquillitatis landing spot. And if you have fluff-filling of rugged terrain you can get other surprises, mostly unpleasant ones.

Tom Spilker
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    You can get a high resolution version of that image: http://livewallpaperswide.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SpaceX%20Interplanetary%20Transport%20System%205K5382814926.jpg , and yes! There are little tiny people waling around on a huge perfectly flat ice sheet (!) on Europa. Little tiny dead people. – Mark Adler May 02 '18 at 19:44
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    I once calculated that humans behind 100 mils of Aluminum (a standard for measuring radiation effects) would get a lethal dose of radiation at Europa's distance from Jupiter in about 15 minutes. And we're not talking cancer here. We're talking direct and immediate nerve damage lethal, so stone cold dead in 15 minutes. Maybe 30 minutes with half the radiation blocked by Europa itself. They probably would have been killed long before that on their way to Europa. – Mark Adler May 02 '18 at 19:48
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    I heard about 15 years ago that without any shielding at all (i.e., a naked human) at Europa's distance, the time to prompt lethal dose from nerve damage is similar to the time it would take exposure to the vacuum to kill you. I would guess that with the significant component of multi-Mvolt and tens-of-Mvolt particles in that radiation field, bremsstrahlung makes shielding beyond some fairly massive level essentially ineffective. – Tom Spilker May 02 '18 at 21:09
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    Interesting about those tiny people hadn't spotted them :). It would be okay for Callisto, gets less surface ionizing radiation than Mars, also flatter than Europa which is one of the roughest objects in the solar system close up with crevasses, turned over ice bergs, probably penitentes, and the artist's impression would do just as well for Callisto which has the advantage of no planetary protection issues and has been proposed as a good site for a human base in the Jupiter system.. – Robert Walker May 03 '18 at 10:00
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    Callisto also makes more sense as a refueling stop. Though you can get to any of the Galilean satellites via flybys with no extra fuel after Jupiter capture orbit, you can get to Callisto with fewer flybys than the others. I don't see anything at all in favour of Europa for humans, and huge negative of planetary protection, contaminating Europa's oceans with Earth life so you probably only find the life you brought there yourself. Why didn't he say it was Callisto? Because more people know where Europa is? – Robert Walker May 03 '18 at 16:07
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    Good point about minimum operating temperature. I think it would depend on the design of the BFR, they could design it to be able to land anywhere with an insulating external layer and ability to keep itself heated, e.g. with electrical heaters if needed. It would need good heat insulation for space for heat rejection, so that e.g. it can fly to Venus, and Mercury, assuming it can fly inwards as well as outwards, perhaps whipple multi-layer micro-meteorite shields would double as heat insulation? They would help to trap a layer of air around the rocket, as on Titan, heat loss is by convection. – Robert Walker May 03 '18 at 16:20
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    @Robert Walker, indeed Callisto is a much less demanding place than Europa. People are enamored with Europa because the combination of gravity magnitude and relatively low sub-ice ocean depth means that at the ocean bottom the water is still liquid, not one of the high-pressure ice forms like ice V or ice VI. This means that autotrophic nutrients, including salt, can leach out of the silicate core into the ocean and make it like Earth's or Enceladus's oceans, so it's high on the list of potential abodes for life. But humans going there could fill the oceans with, say, e. coli. Embarassing! – Tom Spilker May 03 '18 at 17:15
  • Just on that "The cold, dense atmosphere makes for a tremendous convective cooling rate, so without prodigious heating many spacecraft parts would go below their allowable minimum temperatures", let me quote Planetary scientist Dr. Ralph Lorenz of the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University here on the issue of thermal transfer on Titan between the Huygens lander and the thick and cold atmosphere :

    Same problem Huygens confronted. At these low temperatures, radiation basically doesn't transfer any heat at all.

    – thomasjestin May 11 '18 at 09:43
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    Quote continues : "The atmosphere is sufficiently thick and cold that all of the outer surfaces of Huygens were quenched at about 94°K, or maybe 96°K, relatively quickly. Huygens had a 5 cm thick layer of foam insulation that basically limits the heat transfer. the interior was benign, room temperature freezing point, something like that, and outside was 94°K. So it was loosing 350W of heat to maintain that differential. Any long term system at Titan has to buffer that loss, and that's why the radio isotope systems are so important because they have that waste heat available." – thomasjestin May 11 '18 at 09:44
  • Quote continues "The engineering solution is that you insulate." https://youtu.be/fUE1_Gwhm3s?t=3676 – thomasjestin May 11 '18 at 09:47
  • Also Julian Nott, University of California, Santa Barbara said about insulating Humans in suits on the surface of Titan : "gas conductivity falls sharply with temperature, so that simple trapped-gas insulation will work better than on Earth. With a surface area of 2 m2 and insulation 7.5 cm thick, heat loss should be about 150 W, which can be generated by light activity."

    https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Julian_Nott/publication/26883114_Titan_A_Distant_But_Enticing_Destination_for_Human_Visitors/links/5474d4690cf2778985ac233d.pdf

    – thomasjestin May 11 '18 at 09:48
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    Yes, I know Ralph and Julian well, I've worked with them designing Titan mission concepts. Regarding the insulating: yes, that is the obvious answer. But as currently configured, the BFR spacecraft doesn't have that much insulation. To add it requires thicker walls, which is a fairly major structural redesign that increases the inert mass fraction. That's why I said in my answer that it requires an extensive redesign. Using Julian's thermal transport calculation, the cabin of the BFR spaceship would need ~40 kW of heating. Not impossible—I didn't imply that—but a significant redesign. – Tom Spilker May 11 '18 at 17:42
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    I swear every time I spend 5 minutes reading your answers I spend an hour on Wikipedia, and I love it! Stop apologizing for long answers, it's a godsend to people thirsty for information :). – Magic Octopus Urn May 16 '18 at 18:45
  • Oh on the BFR then for humans only the interior of the cabins need to be insulated don't need to add extra exterior insulation. The insulation can be lightweight so mass I think is unlikely to be much of an issue. And normally the problem is heat rejection. For the ISS it's 70 kW of heat rejection capability, a substantial upgrade from the earlier 15 Kw system. https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/473486main_iss_atcs_overview.pdf

    For the rocket itself, then the fuel is best kept cold.

    – Robert Walker Oct 22 '18 at 03:14
  • It's different if it's something on the exterior of the rocket needs to be kept warm. Perhaps electronics for instance. Insulated in a vacuum by thin sheets, but on Titan dissipates too much heat. I suppose worst case is that the BFR has to run heaters to keep it warm... Or. How about just a kind of huge tarpaulin thing that you drape over it after landing? Insulating cover, first BFR to Titan brings this with it, and you use it to wrap the BFR for as long as it is there, or critical components, after all, you only need the insulation on Titan. And in the low gravity, easy to deploy. – Robert Walker Oct 22 '18 at 03:21
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It's probably going to be less of a concern than you'd guess. The icy worlds of our solar system have essentially no atmosphere, so the surface materials will sublimate directly to vapor and be dispersed rather than melting and freezing the landing pads into place.

Fairly little of the surface will be disturbed to begin with. The gas expansion which occurs in a vacuum optimized rocket nozzle cools the exhaust substantially; while temperatures may exceed 3000 K in the chamber, the exhaust may be well below 1000K at the nozzle exit plane.

The exhaust gas will be relatively tenuous for the same reason, and it will disperse rapidly in vacuum, so it will only transfer a small amount of heat to the surface in the few seconds of landing.

Russell Borogove
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    The observation about vacuum-optimized nozzles is true for Europa and Enceladus, but Titan's surface pressure is nearly 1.5 times that at Earth's surface. If you try to run a vacuum-optimized nozzle in that environment without adding a lot of mass in stiffeners the nozzle skirt collapses. Even with the stiffeners the engine performance takes a hit, though with all the aerodynamic assistance available at Titan the ∆V you'd need for landing would be relatively small, and you'd just take that hit. – Tom Spilker May 02 '18 at 19:01
  • On Titan you can simply elect not to land on ice. – Russell Borogove May 03 '18 at 00:37
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    So far we've seen no evidence for anything other than water and organics on Titan's surface. When it formed, the silicates and metals (heavy stuff) sank to form the core, and it looks like no strong convection (cryovolcanism) has brought any of that up onto the ice crust. The organics are the result of sun-driven photochemistry of the methane (and a few other very minor species) in the upper atmosphere raining down onto the surface, "tholins" as Carl Sagan called them. At warmer temperatures most would be gas, liquid, or something akin to grease, not any better than ice to land on. – Tom Spilker May 03 '18 at 01:35
  • The BFR will be able to take off and land on Earth, indeed he's going to start off by building a BFR before the first stage and he says it will be able to get to orbit (just) by itself. So it is rated for a full pressure atmosphere. The first stage booster increases its payload to orbit by an order of magnitude. https://space.stackexchange.com/a/24111/3038 – Robert Walker May 03 '18 at 14:41
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    Agree, ice is likely to be the bulk material with the highest melting point on the Titan surface. Unless they build a launch platform of some other material. – Robert Walker May 03 '18 at 23:20