Can we discuss and philosophize about a manned or (un)manned mission to one of the largest stars (supergiants) known in the milky way,in the very far future ,i know that we dont have any technology to travel farther than our solarsystem but in the far future it is possible i think. First we can go unmanned to this superstar to send a spacecraft (a fast spacecraft) to this big red super or even hypergiant star ,and put the spacecraft in an orbit of the star and discover and takes photographs of it,and send it to the earth. Or we can return the spacecraft back to our solarsystem and finally the earth to put it in orbit of the earth,and send all the collected information (directly) to us ,or we can get it (safely) back on the earth. Second,we can get manned to this very big star with a superfast spaceship that can reach 30 or 50 or more percent of the speed of light ,and maybe we can the astronauts freeze in and defrost them when we are 2 lightyear away from the star to can do the preparings before we arrive in the neighborhood of the star and can (de)accelerate the ship. And when we have reached the star the astronauts are leaving the ship to make spacewalkings to discover the enormous star that has a diameter which is wider than the distance of pluto from the sun. The astronauts will have an unimaginable remarable ,but beautifull view at this terrifying looking big star. We will need very special spacesuits to protect the astronauts against the enormous heat in the neighborhood of the star ,maybe it will be hotter than it is at Mercury (the closest planet to the sun) There is an very important thing that we will keep in mind ,before we will go to this star,we have to know (exactly) when this star explodes as a supernova (red supergiants ending their lives in a supernova explosion) because it is not so funny when you are there and it explodes,that will be (of course) fatal for the astronauts. If we ever will go to this enormous star ,we need to study it for a long time. And then it will be a long way to get the ship with astronauts safely back to the earth ,or maybe they will stay there for the rest of their lives and dont return back to earth and stay in the ship and colonize the neighborhood,and send all the information of the star back to the earth ,but it can take years before it arrives here. I like to discuss about this huge future spacemission ,and what do you think about it? Hopefully this can get a (succesfull) thread. Thanks and greetings.

This is getting a bit annoying.

Why would a mission to Mira Ceti be any different than a Mission to HD 284242?
I suggest you you do a search for older threads about interstellar travel.
Many of these issues will be discussed in them.

Like this thread, for instance.

__________________
Join the Illuminati

Problems are very much the same as your other fantasy mission

Your idea for human hibernation is nice, but its only in movies like 2001:SpaceOdyssey or Aliens and is still sci-fi.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7588904/
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...on_041012.html
http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/biomimeti...p_hhstrategies
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6235944/
putting people in cryo-genic sleep is still impossible, but NASA the Russians and Europeans have been looking into it

If you find it annoying then go find another hobby and go to another forum. For me it is enormous interesting to talk about a mission to this (one of the largest)stars known. This has 1000 times more my interest than a discussion about an orbiter around mars that not make a landing.

What kind of orbiter do we need to orbit this enormous star in a unmanned mission? And what do we need to get close to this star ,if we get manned? a good protected spaceship and what kind of spacesuits for making a spacewalk in the neighborhood of this star? I think that there will be a terrifying and ghostly red light when we are in the area of Mira Ceti. What do you think? Lets talk and discuss about this very interesting (hypothetical) but in the future (possible) mission.

from what I know (and I may be wrong) Its impossible to travel near light speed and not make your spacecraft exit the milky way, yet alone fall into orbit of a star... with such speeds.

you wouldnt want to get too close to this star, if there are good people on board the spacecraft.

__________________
P.S. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.

-- Mitch Hedberg

[quote=The_Radiation_Specialist]from what I know (and I may be wrong) Its impossible to travel near light speed and not make your spacecraft exit the milky way, yet alone fall into orbit of a star... with such speeds.

The real issue here is money. As has been posted before, The Enzmann starship is a valid design from the 70's for a trip to Alpha Centauri in ~ 20 years. It was published in either Sky&Tel or Astronomy magazine...circa..1977? It requires a steel spherical containment ball of liquid hydrogen..~80 m in radius. It requires a nuclear powered ion propulsion drive, and ~ a 300 m long supply, living quarters tube. Physically it looked like a baseball with a long thin pencil sticking out. The distance between the crew quarters, and the supplies assisted in reactor shielding.
The hazards of radiation elucidated in the latest issue of Scientific American were probably underestimated. All of this had to be trucked to orbit, assembled, and prepped to go with a crew willing to give up most of their useful lives.The craft was designed to accelerate at 1 g for ~ one year to close to light speed, travel at that speed, and then decelerate for ~ one year at 1 g. It was estimated then(1977?), that it would take the gross national product of the entire world to accomplish it. Doable? Yes Likely? No.

__________________
A third rate theory forbids
A second rate theory explains after the fact
A first rate theory predicts...A. Lomonosov

Alright, lets take a look:

Mira AKA Omicron Ceti is about 400 light years away, and is a variable star with a 331 day period. It's diameter is huge, being at times large enough that were it in the Sun's place, it would cover part of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It also changes in outward brightness by a variable amount, but has been observed over nearly a factor of 10,000. At its dimmest, it is less bright than the Sun.

Let's imagine that the ESA decides to send an unmanned mission to this star, to explore close up what this star is like. An all out effort is made to try and get there as soon as possible.

They look at the energy requirements, and conclude that they need to build a fusion powerplant more of less like the ITER reactor, but larger, and in space (See http://www.iter.org/index.htm ). This space-based reactor will be designed to generate a continuous 10 gigawatts, have a mass of one thousand tons. The spacecraft will also carry one hundred thousand tons of deuterium which it will fuse to create the power for the trip. The rest of the ship will include a hundred tons of combined structure and payload.

The plan is that this ship will get up to 0.02c, and then turn around to decelerate. The one way trip will last forty-thousand years. Plans are made to keep increasing the budget for the listening stations to detect the increasingly weak signal from the probe over the course of the 400 centuries it takes to get to the target.

Some administrators object noting that there is a risk that this star will explode before the mission can get there, while others say that would provide spectacular information, and is all the more reason to send the mission.

The budget is put together. The cost of the fuel deuterium is brought down to about $70 Euros/ kilogram because of the economies of scale, though another $1000 Euros/kilogram must be added for getting it to orbit. So, for the fuel alone we are looking at 107 billion Euros for the fuel. The reactor is expected to cost seventy billion Euros to build, but the good news is that it will only cost a billion Euros to put its parts in orbit, and another nineteen billion to assemble the parts in space. So, ninety billion Euros for that. Finally is the structure, and the payload. These parts will cost one billion to launch into space, and nineteen billion to assemble the parts in space. However, the development cost of probes and instruments that will work for forty-thousand years through all kinds of radiation and other problems. This cost is estimated at two trillion Euros.

One risk is that there is an assumption that the cost of getting to orbit will drop to $1000/kg.

So the budget to launch this mission is 2.2 trillion Euros with an expected payoff for this expense in forty-thousand, four hundred years. The econmists are ecstatic, and the taxes on the European member states are increased about a thousand Euros per person per year to cover the expense, and the new tax is passed by an overwhelming majority.

Fifty years from now, the mission launches.

__________________
Forming opinions as we speak

I think that an orbiter that goes out of the solarsystem and then heads for a long way to Mira Ceti(exactly the same for a manned ship) can be good protected against the extreme heat and radiation in the close area of the star ,i think about a heat shield. And i think about spacesuits that are extreme good protected against the heat and radiation of this star. And what about the long trip to Mira Ceti? How will that go and happen? I think that we need many orbits around the sun and a lot of flyby,s near jupiter to get more and more speed ,and you need (possibly) a kind of engines that can give the ship finnaly 40 or more percent of the speed of light ,but what kind of ,i dont really know about it. And it needs things to deaccelerate 1 or 2 lightyears before we (or the unmanned spacecraft) arrives at or near the star itself. What do you think about these things?

I think if you have an engine that can get you to 40% the speed of light, you don't need Jupiter flybys. Planning a mission with many flybys of Jupiter will take a minimum of five years per flyby, and after the first one, you'll be on your way out of the solar system. A Jupiter flyby will add 4 km/sec, Note that the speed of light is about 300,000 km/sec.

__________________
Forming opinions as we speak

But most importantly, what do we gain with in-situ observations that we cannot devise using something at a minuscule fraction of the cost of a spaceship, manned or not. It's all glitz and flash and doesn't strike me as really interesting, except for the few engineers that would be at the drawing board.

I can think of a gazillion(at least) places more interesting to visit first, sorry.

__________________
The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

Mira almost certainly isn't massive enough to go supernova; it's actually a relatively low-mass star (of maybe a few solar masses) in the supergiant stage of its life. Artists' conceptions to the contrary, close-up it would not be obviously reddish. Orange, maybe yellow at minimum, but not red. At maximum brightness it would probably appear white--it would simply overload the cones in our eyes, just the way the Sun does to ours.

In any event, if we're talking going ~400 light-years, I'd rather go to some place a little more exotic, like a dwarf nova, or an Earthlike planet, what have you.

__________________
"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

Given the rest of your post Antoniseb, I take it that you were taking the mickey?

If its going to take 40,000 years to get there then I don't see any point sending it because couldn't one extrapolate that at our current rate of improvement we'll be able to get there at a faster speed at some undefined point in the future - so why send out a ship if its going to be superceded in 100 years? in a 1000 years?

Costs and economics and technological improvement and sheer distance completely mitigate against such a mission. I'm all for Space missions, but I would vote out any government that tried to finance such an extravagant waste of money!

Oh, and Denis, do you ever check your private messages mate?

__________________
BugMeNot A portal to bypass free-site registration.

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer - renowned 19th Century German philosopher.

I'm not sure what the phrase "taking the mickey" means, but clearly I didn't think this was a likely scenario. My goal was to try and put even the most optimistic scenario into perspective here. Of all the parts of this mission description, the least likely part is that we could build equipment that will reliably be working 40,000 years from now. This is even less likely than having the people of Europe agreeing to a thousand Euro per year tax hike to pay for it.

Three quick notes: Romanus is right that this star won't turn into a supernova (most likely). It does stand a small chance of being in a different place on the HR diagram by the time the mission arrives.

I did not calculate what the maximum velocity the ship I described could get to. I think the numbers I quoted are somewhat realistic, but don't use them as a reference. Please note that I also don't think that we could build a 1000 ton 10 Gigawatt fusion reactor.

Mantiss' note is important because for much less than 2 trillion Euros, we can build some pretty sophisticated giant-dish Earth or Space-based interferometers that will tell us nearly as much as this craft could tell us but get the information to us today, and be usable on numerous systems, not just Omicron Ceti.

What Denis is asking for is not realistic, but it is interesting for him to speculate about how different that system is from ours.

__________________
Forming opinions as we speak

Which star is (more) luminous,larger,and heavier? Betelgeuze or Mira Ceti. Somebody who knows that?

Heck!

Might I suggest that you go to a Science Fiction forum instead.

__________________
Join the Illuminati

`Taking the mickey' just means suggesting something, that perhaps at a glance sounds plausible, but with just a little investigation is revealed to actually be an argument in the other direction. Ie, You don't really believe that, in this case what you're articulating and proposing, is a viable option and indeed likely - as you clearly state above.

I only really replied to your post because I'm not sure if the OP would necessarily spot the point you were trying to make - about how unlikely the whole enterprise would be!

No probs, I actually think you made the point quite well.

__________________
BugMeNot A portal to bypass free-site registration.

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer - renowned 19th Century German philosopher.