New project, Objective Europa: crowd-researched human exploration of Europa

[Robotbeat]

Agreed... At least, they waited for NASA to find evidence for life before setting out in Europa Report.

[KelvinZero]

Still a fun subject..
Can anyone speculate how much shielding is needed to survive near jupiter? (Especially very near jupiter if that is what is required for an efficient insertion into jupiter orbit)

Im more interested in moderately survivable. Not sure the best way to define that, perhaps healthy enough you would expect to at least live long enough to raise healthy children afterwards, ie not a lifestyle headed for extinction.

(edit)
Another question. Wouldn't using SEP/NEP reduce the usefulness of a close pass by jupiter to exploit the Oberth effect? That would make a stop off to acquire shielding mass more plausible.

[JulesVerneATV]

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20142308-26057.html

single-celled organisms live without sunlight in sub-zero temperatures.

[obi-wan]

1) The expected lifetime of a person in a spacesuit on the surface of Europa is about 90 seconds. It's not that much different from walking into a nuclear reactor. I was part of a study many years ago that concluded that there is no feasible way to provide enough shielding to keep a human alive in Jovian orbit.

2) Having a human around is the LAST way you want to search for Earth-like life on another planet - humans are incredibly messy (biologically), and would totally contaminate the field. Under current planetary protection protocols, the allowable bioload for a Europa lander is 1. That means that over the entire vehicle, inside and outside, the total amount of biological material can add up to the mass of one microbe. Right now, we don't have the technology to create a robot lander we can send to Europa to safely look for life.

[ncb1397]

1) The expected lifetime of a person in a spacesuit on the surface of Europa is about 90 seconds. It's not that much different from walking into a nuclear reactor. I was part of a study many years ago that concluded that there is no feasible way to provide enough shielding to keep a human alive in Jovian orbit.

2) Having a human around is the LAST way you want to search for Earth-like life on another planet - humans are incredibly messy (biologically), and would totally contaminate the field. Under current planetary protection protocols, the allowable bioload for a Europa lander is 1. That means that over the entire vehicle, inside and outside, the total amount of biological material can add up to the mass of one microbe. Right now, we don't have the technology to create a robot lander we can send to Europa to safely look for life.

Sweet, so you can answer some of my questions. First of all, the radiation belt is presumeably made out of eruption material and solar plasma, but what kind of particle speeds are we talking about? One rem isn't equal to one rem if you catch my drift. Higher energy cosmic rays are almost impossible to block while lower energy helium nuclei(alpha particles) can infamously be blocked by a sheet of paper. The other question is given the low eccentricity, low inclination and tidal lock of Europa's orbit and rotation, wouldn't one side of Europa be shielded from a radiation belt that confines particles and directs them one way? I suppose there would be variability as you enter the magnetotail which could cause some problems but my hypothesis is that certain places on the surface might be well shielded from the specific dynamics of Jupiter's radiation belt. The smoothness of the surface would seem to preclude some sort of mountainous valley that would provide protection from some obliquely incident radiation belt although there apparently are some geologic features that could provide protection. Anyways, here is a link I just found that adds weight to the idea of Europan safe havens on the surface.

Patterson and his colleagues are building a detailed map of the surface of Europa and another map of its sister moon Ganymede. The project—led by Louise Prockter of John Hopkins University as part of NASA’s Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology program—will identify dead zones where radiation would likely fry any interesting chemical compounds, as well as possible safe havens that might harbor material expelled from the ocean below.

http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/hiding-from-jupiters-radiation/

Also, if Europa is analagous to walking into a nuclear reactor, a "run of the mill" nuclear reactor would seemingly have enough shielding to stop it?

edit: a bit farther down in the article basically answers some of my questions,

The ions from the belt can penetrate about a millimeter into the ice. Electrons reach roughly a centimeter down, but they also emit high-energy photons that can go as far as a meter deep. Regardless of the type of radiation, these high-energy particles will rip electrons off of molecules, thereby "oxidizing" everything on the surface.

So, the particles are not particularly energetic and can basically be stopped by a meter of shielding(preferrably something that won't be chemically changed by the radiation like water). I would suggest living in a massive ice palace built out of blocks of europan ice. 

[Vultur]

With modern tech, it would be easy to distinguish native life from Earth-derived contamination. Sequence the DNA (if it doesn't have DNA, it's clearly alien).

If its DNA fits in the Earth evolutionary tree, it's native, otherwise it's contamination.

EDIT: I think the fears of contamination in terms of damaging native ecosystems are possibly overstated. Sure there are Earth bacteria that would do great in Europa's ocean (or subsurface endolithic Martian environments), but those probably aren't the human-commensal bacteria: they're the bacteria found in subglacial lakes or cold seeps/hydrothermal vents (or endolithic environments).

It doesn't mean to take no precautions, but I think ruling out humans is excessive.