React on Rails HN RSC Demo

Animats 15h ago

Nice. These missions that tell us the basics about objects in the Solar System are more useful than, say, re-visiting the moon or Mars.

Venus and Europa could use some attention. Anything underway?

lucaslazarus 13h ago

All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.

hn_submit 11h ago

I can't imagine aliens being so stupid to claim part of our Solar System. To me this would become a giant bullseye.

manquer 8h ago

Europa could have some Europeans in it ; or extra solar aliens who can only survive in its climate so don’t care about rest of the system

King-Aaron 8h ago

What if hypothetically they had claimed it before us.

kridsdale1 6h ago

Then they’d better be prepared to defend it.

King-Aaron 5h ago

I'd presume a species capable of interstellar travel would find that fairly trivial

rexskimmer 12h ago

There is also NASA's upcoming mission to Titan, where they plan to fly an octocopter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(Titan_space_probe)

Muhammad523 12h ago

I'm really exited about Dragonfly, as Titan is a world not too different from ours: it gas lakes and rivers (made out of hydrocarbons, like methane), dunes and mountains

tagami 14h ago

Europa clipper launched 2 years ago arrives in 2030. DAVINCI, a Venusian probe, is slated net 2033

GolfPopper 8h ago

BepiColombo, another joint ESA-JAXA mission, will enter orbit around Mercury next month after a longer-than-expected journey. It will be the third spacecraft to visit Mercury.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BepiColombo

godshatter 14h ago

Apparently five Venus missions (DAVINCI, VERITAS, Envision, Venus Life Finder, and Venus Orbiter) all in the next five years or so: https://www.space.com/astronomy/venus/these-5-venus-missions...

For Europa, Europa Clipper Mission (already on the way): https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/mission-time...

... and JUICE (already on the way): https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice

There might be others, those are just what I found in a quick search.

hn_submit 11h ago

I suggest Terraforming Venus with microbes or extremophiles.

And to hell with the "planetary protection" treaty. We need "lebensraum"! Our females want to breed!

kridsdale1 6h ago

Venus needs men!

hparadiz 13h ago

Sample return from Venus is practically impossible with our current tech.

TGower 16h ago

JAXA does great work, they also publish the highest resolution open access global surface elevation model. Really impressive for a country with about 1/10th the GDP of the US.

a3w 12h ago

Bringing Protomolecule to earth, when?

(Minor spoilers for The Expanse, word Protomolecule means something there.)

Panzerschrek 4h ago

Russia tried such mission back in year 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt. Sadly it failed shortly after the launch.

dvh 16h ago

I hope they make some photos of Phobos monolith: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_monolith

tommykins 44m ago

My annual thing I can genuinely comment on in relation to hackernews. This is fucking so cool, I simply cannot tell you how rare it is we get primary material to do anything with.

hbarka 15h ago

I wonder how this mission compares in scale to the JAXA Hayabusa comet interceptor done twenty years ago.

numpad0 1h ago

4 ton launch mass, so 8x mass increase against Og Hayabusa probe(510kg). About 5.4x Satrlink V2 mini sats.

The OG Hayabusa was tiny as it was on the M-V 3-stage all-solid launcher with just 1.85t to LEO of max payload. This one was on H3-24L with up to 16t to LEO(91% of an F9 ASDS) so it's bigger accordingly.

johnea 11h ago

This is good space science.

Unlike iPhone selfies around the moon, or golf on mars.

Manned space missions are very rarely justified in the modern era.

An unmanned probe doing science for 20 years, or a one shot influenza photo op.

The cost is about the same...

fooker 3h ago

It is important to get people excited about science, and inspire the next generation of scientists rather than choose the cheapest path to ‘good science’.

Without public support, you’ll soon find yourself without any funding. This pretty much explains NASA’s dire funding situation over the last thirty or so years.

You can only get so many people excited about weather balloons and space rock chemistry.

dyauspitr 8h ago

> Manned space missions are very rarely justified in the modern era.

Unless you want to be interplanetary

manquer 8h ago

Depends on your definition of you .

If it means life , then We don’t need humans to make life interplanetary at all; that is least efficient way to go about it ; we should instead design/choose lifeforms that are most likely to survive the target environment not depend on brittle/expensive life support technology to spread life through the system.

If the you is intelligence , then spreading AI could be a better approach rather than humans who are unlikely to be able evolve to survive in a hostile environment naturally anytime soon.

Humans in our current form in space is always going to expensive tourism no matter how much science fiction likes to pretend otherwise .

JAXA is about to perform a Phobos sample return mission (science.org)