The Best Way to Explore Europa? Bomb It

Just have the British resurrect their WWII Tall Boy (12K lb) or Grand Slam (22K lb) bombs...one or the other should get the job done!

Wait a minute! Our first interplanetary contact with a potentially inhabitable object and we bomb it??

Klaatu barada nikto.®

It's "habitable" object.

It may be inhospitable though.

Some of us North Dakotans will go. By our winter standards it's right around fuzzy sweater weather there!

Don't forget to pack our ice augers so those of us who ice fish can justify it as a vacation away from the wives.

(Seriously why else would any sane man walk out onto a frozen lake drill a hole and sit there staring at it? Make it on a small moon half way across the solar system and we will call it an extended trip. Sort of like going to Northern Canada!)

"Why would any sane man walk out onto a frozen lake drill a hole and sit there staring at it?" A sane men wouldn't.

And, I learned something 3 winters ago when I visited our house in SW Minn. The snow never melts, a-l-l w-i-n-t-e-r l-o-n-g....... You have to hire people to cut slots in the snow so you can get from the street to your house, or garage.

No, sane people would not live like this. Only Lutherans and other misfits would do that to themselves on purpose.

What else would one expect from the generation brought up on Space Invaders, eh?

They'll upset the Ice Queen and she'll send her army to hold Earthlings accountable.

Maybe she could fix global warming?

"Penetrators offer a number of advantages over 'soft landers', which have to slow down to reach the surface safely," explained ESA project manager Sanjay Vijendran. "They would enable you to get deep into the sub-surface essentially for free, up to three meters without having to drill. And being light means you can deploy a few at once from a single spacecraft orbiter."

Really...? THREE (3) W-h-o-l-e meters...?! Wow-ee-ka-zow-ee!

All we gotta do is shoot this penetrator ((a-c-c-u-r-a-t-e-l-y)) a BILLION Miles...give or take a few centimeters...and we can plow a whole 3 meters into that old icy crust?

I am truly amazed that three year olds are allowed to write such articles.

Maybe water was hard when it froze.

....ehhh....."ok". Perhaps I might oughtta have delved a little deeper before jumping to such a raw conclusion... but, here's about what I read , skimming-through:

"What's the best way to explore Jupiter's icy moon Europa?...

Below its frozen, dirty surface, scientists know a liquid water ocean hides....some hypotheses hint at the potential for complex organisms evolving in Europa's depths....

"huge challenges confronting any future manned or unmanned expedition to the Jovian moon (include) no atmosphere so mounting a surface mission would require a huge amount of energy to slow the lander safely" (thus, no slowing of a penetrator).

...to access the subsurface ocean, the mission would need some kind of novel drilling technique to drop a probe through the miles of icy crust.

The Europa mission should consist, at least in part, of a high-velocity projectile that will use brute force to kick off exploration of this fascinating world."

T H E N ... to see the (ironic?) claim that this multi-£-$-billions project will be shooting a billion miles to dig a whopping "3 meters" of the way into a "target-needed-distance" of "miles of icy crust" just seems a bit ... ludicrous(?)

Just my own variant of pragmatic meditation....

So what's to say that some other alien race didn't do that to us some ~65 million years ago but they just used a big rock to keep the budget low?

Well we couldn't see any life forms moving from a few billion miles away so it seemed like a good idea to shoot a big rock at it and see what pops up afterward.