The rise of nanometers - Chapter 773 Exploring the Ice World

Finally, after more than a month of preparation, Su Xiaoyu finally completed discussions with the Space Ministry Headquarters and chose an ice field on the back of Europa as the landing site.

After setting the landing site, Su Xiaoyu issued the landing command. The rest of the situation could only rely on the intelligent system of the lander itself.

The helplessness of communication delays is such a pain in the ass.

At an altitude of 286 kilometers on Europa, when Heather flew around the designated position, the intelligent system on the probe immediately started the thrusters for landing.

The pale red flame pushed the lander towards the back of Europa.

Fortunately, the gravity of Europa is not high. Even if the lander is captured by gravity, its speed will not increase rapidly, but will slowly fly towards the surface.

Moreover, the auxiliary engine was started three times in succession during the flight, constantly adjusting the flight posture and speed.

When landing on Europa, you must not rush it, because the closer to the surface of Europa, the higher the oxygen concentration here. In an oxygen-rich environment, even a small spark may cause metal to burn.

Although the Heather’s lander was designed with Europa’s oxygen-rich atmosphere in mind, it abandoned its previous hydrogen-oxygen engine and switched to nitrogen-based fuel.

A series of flame-retardant materials are also used on the protective layer of the design, but the oxygen-rich environment is still a bit too troublesome and must be fully prepared.

Finally, after the fourth auxiliary engine braking, the lander reached mid-air 200 meters above the ground.

At this time, the lander releases a large amount of powder, which reacts with the surrounding oxygen and quickly forms a large piece of aerogel foam, wrapping the entire lander.

With the cushioning of airgel foam, the lander landed safely on the ice.

After a while, the cushioning airgel foam began to decompose and turned into real foam. Each one vaporized and disappeared, and finally the round lander was revealed.

The 12.3-ton lander now has only 10.8 tons left after consuming 1.5 tons of fuel and cushioning foam.

Among them, supporting equipment for the lander accounts for 5.2 tons; scientific equipment accounts for 3.6 tons; and the remaining 2 tons are spare fuel.

The spherical shape is designed to facilitate handling of ice crack valleys and special terrains, as well as to enhance the overall strength of the lander.

This is a new design based on the lessons learned from the previous lander.

The ball-shaped lander unfolded its eight mechanical legs, adjusted its landing posture, and then unfolded the front side to reveal the detection equipment protected inside. A communication pot protruded from the top, looking like a mechanical spider.

The purpose of using mechanical legs instead of wheels or tracks is to adapt to the surface environment of Europa.

Whether it is wheeled or tracked, its flexibility is not as good as mechanical feet. In addition, Europa’s gravity is very low. As a mobile system, mechanical feet do not affect the speed much.

On the contrary, if the mechanical spider encounters an ice chasm, a sudden earthquake, ice collapse, etc., it can shrink into a ball and resist these situations in its most defensive form.

Even if it falls into cracks and rifts, the mechanical spider can escape from most dangers through its flexible mechanical feet.

After deploying its mechanical legs, the spider lander moved around on its eight legs.

at the same time.

After a series of signal relays, 17 minutes later, Su Xiaoyu at the Mars outpost finally received the information that the lander had successfully landed, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

Then he quickly adjusted his mood and started busy again.

Data from the Spider lander is being fed back continuously. Although there is a one-way communication delay of about 17 minutes, Su Xiaoyu is much faster than the Blue Star headquarters.

If the Blue Star headquarters wants to control the Spider lander, there will be a communication delay of at least 24 minutes in one-way communication, and the delay in round-trip communication reaches about 48 minutes.

After getting the first batch of data, Su Xiaoyu checked some of the key data and found that there was no obvious difference with the values ​​estimated by the researchers.

In fact, as for the surface of Europa, after collecting data from so many exploration missions, the Ministry of Aeronautics and Astronautics has mastered a lot of information and analyzed many valuable things from it.

For example, last time, the lander only stayed on the surface of Europa for 86 minutes and brought a lot of useful data to researchers.

The spider lander was developed based on these data.

Three hours later, after Su Xiaoyu had dinner, he contacted Blue Star headquarters and began to issue further mission instructions, asking the spider lander to try to move northeast.

The back side of Europa orbits Jupiter very fast, and its revolution period is about 3 and a half days, which is about 84 hours to orbit Jupiter in one day.

Therefore, the time that the back side of Europa is exposed to sunlight is about 42 hours.

It is in the sunshine period at this time, but for the Spider lander, the advantage of being in the sunshine period is not that it has solar energy, but that it happens to be in the shortest communication distance with the Mars outpost.

If it is in the dark period, one or two more relay communications must be added to ensure smooth communication.

During the daylight period on Europa, the intensity of sunlight is very weak. If it relies on solar energy to drive the Spider lander, it probably won’t have to work.

The Spider lander uses two tiny nuclear decay batteries, which are enough to supply it with all-weather operation on Europa.

The designed working life, if there are no accidents, can work here continuously for about 12 years.

Of course, on a strange planet with such a harsh environment, the service life of these landers usually does not reach the designed life.

Just like the previous lander, it only worked for 86 minutes before it fell to the ground and became disabled. After that, although it could emit weak signals, it worked for 55 days with a disability before receiving a box lunch.

Su Xiaoyu could only wish the spider lander not to get the lunch box so quickly, but to provide more data to the federation.

The solar radiation coming from hundreds of millions of kilometers away appears somewhat insignificant on the back of Europa.

But it is undeniable that these sunlight are still tirelessly changing Europa. The sunlight and the water molecules in the ice layer produce a photodecomposition reaction, decomposing the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

Among them, the hydrogen escapes into outer space, while the oxygen lingers around Europa. After years of photolysis reactions, Europa’s surface is covered with an oxygen-rich atmosphere.

Aurora can be seen everywhere during the sunshine period here.

It was the brilliance of sunlight colliding with oxygen molecules and water molecules. Under this cold light, the spider lander crawled slowly toward the northeast.

As we move forward, we can see traces of snowflakes falling slowly in the thin air.

This is when the water molecules on the ice surface evaporate into water vapor under the sunlight, and then instantly encounter the cold air and directly condense into snowflakes.

This snowflake is delicate and short-lived, like the life pulse of Europa, weak with a hint of stubbornness.

Suddenly, the spider lander’s detection equipment fed back some information to the on-board intelligent system. There was a crack hidden under the ice and snow ahead.

Although the width of the crack is only 30 to 70 centimeters, it is also covered with ice and snow about 1.2 meters thick.

But the Spider lander still chooses to take a detour now, because the ice and snow layers on the low-gravity Europa surface may be very fluffy.

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