If we can slow it down some it should fall closer to Jupiter. The tidal forces would melt the ice, and now there would be a warm Ocean to harbor life more easy. Any thoughts?

how? when? with what?

and recently there is a theory that states that europa's oceans may be harmful to life - acidic

__________________
Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

Some organisms like acidic environments. It could be nuked to slow it down.

how much of a bang would be required....?

__________________
Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

Millions of mega tons or an asteroid/comet impact could do it.

I'm assuming that you don't want realistic numbers here. Good luck with the project.

__________________
Forming opinions as we speak

LOL. If Europa is slowed down too much it will fall into Jupiter's atmosphere.
It could also crash into other moons and /or the planetary rings.

But even if successfull, it would cause more harm then good.
The radiation from the planet is bad enough at Europa's present orbit. A closer orbit would be more deadly and more quickly to so do.

But I saw an interesting program on IPT last night which had to do with caves, and micro-organisims living in a hostile environment of heat, sulpheric acid, and darkness. These things actually lived on components of sulpheric acid.
It got me thinking about Europa, Ganymede, Titan, and Venus.

It raises the posibilities, and brings about more questions yet.
Good enough reason to continue and expand the role of our space program.

I think this kind of project would be impossible to do, and certainly impossible to control, as Planetwatcher shows, there are too many variables.

__________________
Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

While we are on the subject of altering orbital velocities of planetary bodies I´d like to share a fantasy that I had many times when I worked in a factory doing an extremely boring job which left my mind to wander!

We often think of Mars & Venus as being planets of similar size to the Earth as well as being the closest. We have speculated for centuries the possibilities of there being life on them & SF writers have written untold 1,000´s of stories based on that idea but once we discovered just inhospitable they are to life they seemed to have lost interest.

One, Venus, is too hot (apart from the atmosphere of sulphuric acid clouds) whereas the other, Mars, is too cold & has no atmosphere to speak of. So in my fantasy I imagine moving both these planets to the same orbit as the Earth´s! (I told you it´s a fantasy!). What would the effect be on our Sun? I had never really thought about this until I read about the "star wobble" that has allowed astronomers to detect extra-solar planets around other stars.

As I´m a very pragmatic person I cannot but help thinking about all the practical details such an impossible mission would have - from installing some kind of propulsive power - to the telluric upheavals such an action would have on the respective planets! Venus would need to be sped up so that it would increase its distance from the Sun whereas with Mars it would be just the opposite - we would need to slow its orbital speed down so that it begins to fall towards the Sun. Then it would be a question of adjusting their respective orbital speeds to match that of Earth´s & ensuring that all three planets are equally spaced out along the same orbital path around the Sun.

Then Venus would cool down & Mars would warm up! If they are equally spaced out along the same orbit I don´t think Earth would suffer in any way - unless of course the three planets have some destabilising effect on the Sun itself that could affect live on the Earth!

Now you have another reason for my name Space - MAD!!! :P

(I did warn you it was a fantasy!!)

__________________
"A wild scheme, it would be useless undertaking”
Charles Darwin's father on hearing of his son's plans to join HMS Beagle

SpaceMad's Space Page

Helmut Lotti Fan Club

http://clubdefansdehelmutlotti.comli.com/index_esp.htm

Join me on the BeyondSpace forum at
http://beyondspace.info/forum/index.php
A bilingual forum in English & Spanish

Hey, Space Mad's fantesey is not so outlandish. In fact truth be known, I've even thought of it myself. But I would add a varable, which is to increase the size of Mars, by combining it with Mercury, Callistio, Io, and Europa.

Those 5 combined would come up close to the size of Venus. Mercury and Io's voclanic activity would make combining the planets easier, and Europa would provide the water.
All three planets would be in stable orbits in the life zone exactly one third an orbit apart. Communications between bodies would be easy and constant.

So Space Mad you are not so crazy. There are others who equal you in imagination.

I am becoming increasingly convinced, the more I think about it, that thiese plans although i still maintain wacky, are feasible...in a remote sense....

__________________
Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

I had just such a wacky Idea myself, and it too, came from a boring job! aah!
Boring jobs and the creative mind, have we discovered something here or what B)

Some of you may remember the two bodies similar size sharing an atmosphere? like Io or Europa orbit the earth a bit closer than the moon. I think the consensus was massive earthquakes.

But I often think of launching rockets to set up on passing comets and asteroid and cleaning up the solar system a bit, and dumping them on mars, pump up the gravity a bit, add a bit of moisture etc, and if we don't clean up our back yards, we mayt find nudging the earth towards mars a bit is the best chance of countering the greenhouse effect. Though, if I understand any of it, some part of earth will be getting colder??

Ah, dream a dyson scale dream.

__________________
My Webpage

And I thought I was MAD!!!! :P I see that there are others of you out there with similar ideas to mine! :P

But as I said I´m a very pragmatic person & can´t help thinking of the practical details. I did think for some years (many, many years ago!) that perhaps we could move the Earth a little closer to the Sun (that is till I discovered that to warm up a little you only had to travel a few hundred miles south - you didn´t need to move the whole planet!!) (I live in the U.K. but to those of you in the Southern Hemisphere it would mean moving north a little!) but it would mean serious telluric upheavals which would probably mean the destruction of much of the Earth. (in this case the same would be true if we tried to counter the greenhouse effect by moving the planet a little closer to Mars! :P )


The problem I see with amalgamating planets is that they would be uninhabitable for many 1,000´s of years - at the very least! (thus defeating the purpose for which we would want to amalgamate them in the first place!) Perhaps a couple of water-ice asteroids would not make such a catastrophic "impact" on Mars & would add much needed water /water vapour without the need to introduce volcanic planets.


I´m still very much interested in the effect that introducing 3 planets into the same orbital pathway around the Sun would have on our star. So if anybody has any ideas, I would be very interested in reading about them.

__________________
"A wild scheme, it would be useless undertaking”
Charles Darwin's father on hearing of his son's plans to join HMS Beagle

SpaceMad's Space Page

Helmut Lotti Fan Club

http://clubdefansdehelmutlotti.comli.com/index_esp.htm

Join me on the BeyondSpace forum at
http://beyondspace.info/forum/index.php
A bilingual forum in English & Spanish

Ok Spacemad, at least I have an observation.

Basically, you have 2 planets, Venus and Mars to deal with. One needs to speed up and the other needs to slow down. Link them somehow and exchange/transfer momentum.

I don't know if those carbon-fiber nanotube cables will work into it, cause there might have to be a disconnect and reconnect when the cable has to skip over the sun...Hey!...I got it. Jumprope! Cable the two planets together, hook on some PV material and small winches along the way(for taking up slack and keeping tension), maneuver the rope with the PV panels catching the solar wind and introduce some resonance waveform which jumps the rope over the sun every so often when the planets are in opposition?

And, use the Bucky Fuller technique of Tensigrity to replace solid section of the cable with tiny struts under compression with tinier nanofibers, which should reduce the total mass of the cable by a factor of 1000 or so. Remember Kenneth Snelson and his Tensigrity sculpture tower at the Smithsonian?

Yeah, thanks for getting the ideas flowing, Spacemad! I think this could work. :P

__________________
Pre-Quote: 'To survive one has to experiment. When the environment changes, the traditional way of doing things doesn't work.'

Quote:
"It's the outriders, the organisms that seem to be maladjusted before the change, which are the only ones that survive these changes...in that way a species continues."

Carl Sagan

OK, I'll admit to an attack of this madness too.

Like Tom2Mars said, it's a matter of transferring angular momentum and energy from one planet to another - a huge amount of energy and angular momentum, so it's a massive undertaking.

Here's the scheme I was thinking of:

Rather than try to control the motion of a planet directly, we instead control the motion of an asteroid. Let's start small, and work our way up. Rockets (someone mentioned an Atlas at one point I think) are out of the question for this - too little effect. Naw, let's use an ion engine that get's its power from solar energy, and uses some of the mass of the asteroid as reaction mass. Small thrust, but essentially unlimited time. This is going to be a long term project <G>.

So we slowly adjust the orbit of this asteroid, until we can get it to make a close pass by Mars or the Earth - probably Mars first, because it's closer to most asteroids (we may have to use Jupiter for the first flyby to get a nice sized asteroid into a Mars approaching orbit).

We carefully plan the flyby of Mars to kick the asteroid into an orbit with a small perihelion and large aphelion, picking up energy and angular momentum from the flyby, but putting it into an orbit that approaches Earth. This maneuver will very slightly lower Mars' orbit while raising the asteroid's. Give it a very high aphelion for the largest effect.

Then we carefully plan the Earth flyby to lower the aphelion of the asteroid's orbit, reducing its energy again, but putting it into a Mars approaching orbit once more. For the biggest effect here, we want the aphelion lowered to just above Mars' orbit. This maneuver will very slightly raise the Earth's orbit, while lowering the asteroid's.

We very carefully plan a series of flybys, like we did with the Pioneers, Voyagers, Galileo, etc. All that's involved is steering, so the energy inputs are relatively small. Each pair of passes will transfer energy and angular momentum from Mars to Earth - much more than we could directly exert. Slowly but surely, Earth's orbit will get larger, and Mars' orbit will get smaller. Mars being 1/10th as massive than Earth, it's orbit will be affected much more (and the flybys there will have to be very close and very precisely controlled).

With global warming being a concern here, and Mars being so cold, it wouldn't hurt either planet to have their orbits adjusted like this. And small impulses like this, over and over, will leave the orbits relatively circular at all times. Or if you don't want to cool the Earth off a touch, use Venus or Jupiter to dump Mars' energy and angular momentum.

I haven't done the math, so I don't know how long it would take to make significant adjustments to two planets this way (obviously it depends on the size of asteroid you could manipulate). Maybe we manipulate a dozen or a hundred asteroids this way to speed things up. More likely it's totally impractical madness.

I don't think you can use this technique to get the two planets co-orbital. At some point they'd get close enough together to start directly influencing each other, and that would be uncontrollable. But I think you could drop Mars by 20 million miles or so, and raise Earth by 2 million in the process, and the two would likely still be in stable orbits, and each would benefit in terms of habitability.

Maybe it's still totally impractical, but I think this is probably the most energy efficient way to adjust the orbits of planet sized objects, because you only have to supply energy for steering, the rest is coming from the orbital energy of the planets themselves.

At least, it's the best I could come up with.

Now I'll try to go back to being sane for a while.

Now you've done it Thorn !

__________________
My Webpage

Now you've done it Thorn!

While we are indulging our imaginations, I was thinking thinking, why waste time with artificial gravity, why not have the real thing on starships, what we need is a rod of neutron star that would communicate rough equivalence to earths mass, then we take our atmosphere with us. and as far as mars is concerned, we inject NS blobs beneath areas we wish to colinize, thus pulling in the required mass to attract an atmosphere that plants won't shrivel up and die in.

__________________
My Webpage

The problem is that if you were able to get your hands on an earth mass of Neutron Star stuff, and remove it from the vicinity of something as massive as, oh, say, a neutron star, it would immediately explode back into normal matter. See, it needs that extreme gravity to keep it compressed into neutron star stuff.

Other than that, it was a great idea.

I hate to rain on your parade like that, but I prefer to keep my madness just slightly in touch with physical reality

:P We´ve really got something going here, haven´t we?!

I like your ideas on using asteroids to influence the orbits of our chosen planets, I´d always had a problem with using rockets! So if we could get a number of asteroids to do the dirty work , i.e. provide the necessary energy to move the planets what more could we hope for! Perhaps they could go in succession - one after the other, like a goods/freight train (with a couple of months spacing between them to avoid any possible collisions or that one might fall on Mars) :P !

I had thought that if somehow we could transfer Mars´ angular movement somehow to Venus we could use their respective energies to increase / decrease their orbits. I couldn´t imagine how it could be done but Tom2Mars & you have provided a couple of possible solutions!

__________________
"A wild scheme, it would be useless undertaking”
Charles Darwin's father on hearing of his son's plans to join HMS Beagle

SpaceMad's Space Page

Helmut Lotti Fan Club

http://clubdefansdehelmutlotti.comli.com/index_esp.htm

Join me on the BeyondSpace forum at
http://beyondspace.info/forum/index.php
A bilingual forum in English & Spanish

Perhaps, we have aready altered the Earths orbit about the sun a little bit when we tested all those nuclear bombs years ago, and didn't think about it then????????????
Oh no!!!! It could have altered the Earhs path so we will intersect an asteroid or comet one day. Who knows?????
Anyhow, doing such a thing to Europa could melt all the ice if placed in the right position. Radiation won't penatrate the water to deeply. Perhaps, lots of organisms could survive more easy.

errorist, I think you will find that had all the nuclear bombs exploded on the Earth - even if they had all exploded in the same instant - which they obviously didn´t - they wouldn´t have made the slightest difference to the planet´s orbit around the Sun. You would need an awful lot more than that - possibly more than even exists today with all the thousands of bombs that the USA, Russia, U.K., France, India, etc. have stored up to annihilate each other - if ever the opportunity were to arise.
:angry:

__________________
"A wild scheme, it would be useless undertaking”
Charles Darwin's father on hearing of his son's plans to join HMS Beagle

SpaceMad's Space Page

Helmut Lotti Fan Club

http://clubdefansdehelmutlotti.comli.com/index_esp.htm

Join me on the BeyondSpace forum at
http://beyondspace.info/forum/index.php
A bilingual forum in English & Spanish

Well, that would create the condition of Nuclear Winter, which would do the job of cooling the Earth off quite nicely, and without having to change the orbit of Earth. And, it would get rid of that huge stockpile of pesky nuclear weapons. Hmmm. multiple positive benefits, it's almost too good to be true.

__________________
Pre-Quote: 'To survive one has to experiment. When the environment changes, the traditional way of doing things doesn't work.'

Quote:
&quot;It's the outriders, the organisms that seem to be maladjusted before the change, which are the only ones that survive these changes...in that way a species continues.&quot;

Carl Sagan

hmmm, this may sound ridiculous, but how about using them all to make nuclear winter in Venus? yea, it probably won't work, but you never know... if we have luck, it might get something done (hopefully that nuclear winter to cool the planet off). if not, at least we got rid of nukes... either way, there's plus side

__________________
High school kills me... though I got A- from physics exam.. But native language sucks: C-.... I've been wondering lately that why I suck so much in native language, but understand germanic languages so well? Ah well, KeiZka signs off.

:huh: If only we could get rid of all those weapons - whether they would do any good on Venus is another question (I don´t think they would!) but it would do the Earth an awful lot of good!

That´s all very well, Tom, but what about the "side effects" the radiation poisoning would have on every living thing upon Earth? The "Nuclear Winter" resulting from such a blast would kill off anything the radiation didn´t kill off first!

I think we might be better off keeping the stockpile!!! :unsure:

__________________
"A wild scheme, it would be useless undertaking”
Charles Darwin's father on hearing of his son's plans to join HMS Beagle

SpaceMad's Space Page

Helmut Lotti Fan Club

http://clubdefansdehelmutlotti.comli.com/index_esp.htm

Join me on the BeyondSpace forum at
http://beyondspace.info/forum/index.php
A bilingual forum in English & Spanish