I've been wondering. Instead of landing a probe on Europa with a drill to slowly drill through the ice to the presumed ocean or with an internal heat source (most certainly nuclear) to slowly melt through the ice. Why not just use a nuclear weapon to blast through the ice? It's faster, mature well-established technology, would no doubt be effective. And Europa is already bathed continuously in lethal levels of radiation. That from a nuclear device would be a drop in the bucket.
Because the public would never support the idea of launching a nuke into space. NASA has enough trouble sending probes that have tiny nuclear reactors onboard because of idiots who think that the trace amounts of material pose a threat to all life on Earth should something go wrong. Saying you want to send a nuke to blow a hole in the ice is such a non-starter you might as well ask why don't start killing puppies and kitten for school lunches.
Coming from a guy who lives in a state that's still upset over losing a war 152 years ago, that's a bit rich.
Oh please. Arkansas was barely for the Confederacy. I had relatives who fought on both sides. Generally depending on which way the battle was going......
Your family has nothing to do with it. The state's opposition to the repeal of Jim Crow laws, segregation, voting rights, and a host of other issues proves that people, regardless of where they live, have a hard time "getting over it." Don't forget, you're the one who's puzzled over why people aren't "getting over" Trump being elected President, and is asking when the Anti-Trump "hysteria" will die down. And prior to this, we had 8 years of people claiming Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, hellbent on subjecting us to Sharia Law. "Getting over things" is not something humans do easily.
Radiation aside, plutonium and many of the products in fallout are still toxic. Also I strongly doubt its effectiveness. Particularly a ground burst on an atmosphere-less world. If you need a sci-fi based example, consider Galactica surviving being nuked by a Basestar. It's not magic TV tech, nukes are just much less powerful in space. Most of the destructive force of nuclear weapons on Earth is in the heating it does *to the air*, and the over/underpressure the blast wave causes. All the energy released in space (from which the surface of Europa is not significantly different) goes right into X-rays. At best you get half the yield in the right direction. The ice is 10-15 miles thick. It's approximately 2.2MJ to boil 1 kg of ice from -10° C (a lot warmer than the actual ice temperature on Europa, but the heats of fusion and vaporization dominate the expression). A 1 megaton device can put 2.092PJ into the ice (the other half goes into space, remember). That's about a million kg of ice boiled, a hemisphere of radius 62.1 meters, assuming no losses -- there are better ways to get a 65-yard hole in the ground. Burying the nuke gets you a bit more, but the size of the hole is still proportional to the cube root of the size of the explosion (r (in feet) = 55 * 3√y where y is the yield in kilotons for underground nuke testing). Even a Tsar Bomba with a uranium tamper would only get you sub-mile diameter cavity. Now melting a hole the size of a standard ice core, even at 15 miles thick, is only melting 110 cubic meters of ice, 110,000 kg. Sure, that's almost 1/9 of the amount of ice boiled with a nuke, but using a relatively low-power source, you can actually just melt the ice instead of boiling it way, which saves you most of the energy. Even if you want to melt a meter-wide hole instead of a 7.62cm hole, that's 18,959,510 kg of ice to melt, which still takes only 1.5x the energy you get out of a 1 MT nuclear weapon (buried), which as we discussed, gets you a pockmark on the surface rather than a hole to the liquid ocean. No, nuking Europa is not a good idea.
O2C beat me to it... Political and ecological issues aside, a nuke is not going to blast through miles of solid ice. A really big one might blow a crater a few hundred meters deep, but that's it.
Also, because nukes would destroy everything the mission is looking for. Yea, let's chain up 500 megatons to blast away the ice and make absolutely sure no organic compound within miles survives. It's gonna be fantastic I do wonder if the surface isn't sterile. If there's anything, it's in the ocean below. We need to get down there. But how to dig a hole on Europa we have trouble with digging here at home. Or is the ice renewed over time with water from the ocean, bringing stuff up? Why would it be. To catch the geysers we'd need to know where they are... or will be. But I do applaud the effort. Impressing this went through Congress. Politics these days is so comletely without vision. Can't wait for the landing when I'm 60 or so
Europa has fault lines where the ice cracks and water comes up from beneath before freezing. Landing near one of those faults should enable us to find some organic materials, assuming they exist. We know at least some of them erupt from the poles. Brace yourself, the guy proposing this is a Republican. He represents Houston, TX, so it's not too surprising that he'd be so interested in this, I guess.
IIRC, research into nuclear warheads designed to penetrate deep into the Earth can destroy hardened targets buried and hardened hundreds of feet deep with warheads in the 300 kiloton range. Dropping such a warhead at high speed into the surface of Europa would seem to be well within the capabilities of current technology.
Houston is the space center responsible for MANNED space missions. IIRC the one most responsible for unmanned missions is Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in California.
At Europa's surface temperatures, water ice is as hard as granite. I don't think too many of our bunker busters can get very far in that stuff. Of course, then how do you gather samples in such a situation? Europa's got a relatively low escape velocity, so the stuff's going to tend to shoot into space. Yes, to both. However, it's entirely possible that he and some of the politicians from CA have worked out at deal where they'd support NASA related programs which would benefit the other's constituents. Sort of a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" kind of deal. If the guy from Houston introduces a program which will benefit people in another state, then he can hardly be accused of trying to secure pork for his district.
In a literal sense, yes, it would be well within our capabilities to fire a nuke with a hardened warhead casing on a missile into the surface of Europa. In a practical get-to-the-oceans-of-Europa sense... No. The missiles do the penetrating. The nuke just sets off a shockwave designed to melt, pulverize, crack, or shear the rock in the vicinity and collapse the structure which will no longer have sufficient structural support (or melt the structure if you hit the facility directly) due to the aforementioned types of rock deformation. The ice at that temperature is ~5.5-6 on the Mohs scale, not 1.5 as it is near the melting point. That's like penetrating knife-edge steel or soft granite. We do not have missiles that can penetrate hundreds of feet of soft granite or medium steel, let alone 10-15 miles! And if we did, it'd be stupidly wasteful to put a nuke on them. You get a couple hundred more feet, maybe, but then you collapse your entrance tunnel, and you've got to fly another missile right into your icy rubble. Repeat dozens of times, oh and by the way now everything is covered in plutonium. Why wouldn't you just put a heated probe into the warhead space instead to that you could just continue melting from wherever the first and only missile stopped? (Answer: because you want your scientific instruments to survive the landing, so you use a proper lander, not a missile!) Consider that we don't see holes in Europa's ice crust. That tells us that the regular asteroid impacts in the Jovian system (see the surfaces of the other Jovian moons) do not possess the energy to bore through the ice. In fact, it'd take an asteroid about 80% the mass of the one that killed the dinosaurs (est. 240 GT) to bore a hole in the Europan ice (at least there all the kinetic energy goes into the ice, albeit still in a hemisphere shape), assuming a similar impact velocity. Your puny nukes will barely make a dent by comparison, no matter what fancy missiles you put them on. This idea is fantasy, not science. The only reason you'd ever use nukes on Europa is if you needed a bore shaft with a radius measured in dekameters or hectometers rather than centimeters, you don't particularly care how much you contaminate the ice with fallout and irradiate depths which are not irradiated currently, you don't care at all about measuring the properties of the ice on Europa except at the surface, AND you're fine with the occasional collapse of the borehole above requiring you to use extra nukes. A drill, mechanical or heat-based, is a superior solution in literally every other circumstance.
