Galileo could hurt future nuclear powered probes

[Bill Dunaway]

Crashing Galileo into Jupiter to avoid potential contamination of Jupiter's moons could make it more difficult to justify future nuclear powered probes. Environmentalists will see this as an admission from NASA that nuclear isotopes are dangerous. They will complain that NASA is more concerned about alien organisms than life on Earth.

[Mainframes]

Crashing Galileo into Jupiter to avoid potential contamination of Jupiter's moons could make it more difficult to justify future nuclear powered probes. Environmentalists will see this as an admission from NASA that nuclear isotopes are dangerous. They will complain that NASA is more concerned about alien organisms than life on Earth.

Of course the environmentalists are totally missing the point as usual. The reason for crashing Galileo into Jupiter being to avoid MICROBIAL contamination. Of course we can't expect the environmentalists to use their brains or actually make the effort to find out why Galileo was crashed......

[ocasey3]

Crashing Galileo into Jupiter to avoid potential contamination of Jupiter's moons could make it more difficult to justify future nuclear powered probes. Environmentalists will see this as an admission from NASA that nuclear isotopes are dangerous. They will complain that NASA is more concerned about alien organisms than life on Earth.

Of course the environmentalists are totally missing the point as usual. The reason for crashing Galileo into Jupiter being to avoid MICROBIAL contamination. Of course we can't expect the environmentalists to use their brains or actually make the effort to find out why Galileo was crashed......

You know, this attack on all environmentalists is getting pretty tired. I consider myself to be one to a degree but I also know what is really a threat and what is not. There are extremists in every field.

[Ilya]

You know, this attack on all environmentalists is getting pretty tired. I consider myself to be one to a degree but I also know what is really a threat and what is not. There are extremists in every field.

And like in every other field, extremists in environmental movement are the ones making the most noise and are most visible.

[atticus05]

Hmmm...

I think NASA will continue to use RTG's as a power source and here's why, a quote from Phil's own page:

"Jupiter is too far from the Sun to use solar power very well. The solar panels would need to be very large, too large and heavy to get to Jupiter."

So until a viable alternative develops, we will need to use RTG's for probes which are sent deep within our oun solar system. Besides, the RTG's themselves are very safe. They are designed not to realease thier Pu into a planets atmostphere. If the 40 kg's used to power galileo did the impossible and were released into the earth's atmosphere, the radiation dosage to each person wouldn't even be noticeable/measureable, we get far more radiation from the enviroment which we live in every day.

~Atticus05

[ToSeek]

The Pluto probe will be using RTGs. If the anti-nuke nuts wanted to complain about that, they should be doing it now. Instead, they'll wait until just before launch and expect an already-built mission to be cancelled.

[Kaptain K]

:-$ Don't give them any ideas! [-X

[The Bad Astronomer]

Of course the environmentalists are totally missing the point as usual.

I would argue about environmentalists using Galileo as a rhetorical tool, but that's not what I want to talk about here.

You are making a bit of a jump to say ".. are totally missing the point" as if this were a done deal. That is a strawman argument.

[Marjorie]

Who claimed that NASA is more concerned about aliens than about life on earth? That is a totally preposterous idea. They want to avoid contamination that would make scientific study of alien life difficult It's like going to a doctor and having to use sterilized equipment to collect a sample for a medical test. If outside bacteria is present, it is impossible to determine what is wrong with the patient.

Similarly, if earth bacteria gets onto one of Jupiter's moons, or anything else, by accident, how can NASA determine whether or not the moon actually has indigenous life? That's why they want to avoid contamination, not because they don't care about life here on earth.

[mike alexander]

For what it's worth, my back of the Excel calculation shows that if you take the total Pu in the Galileo RTGs and uniformly mix it in just the top 2,000 km of Jupiter's atmosphere you end up with about 80 atoms of Pu per cubic meter.

The average density of interstellar space is 1 atom/cm^3, or 10^6 atoms/m^3 for comparison.

Even if I'm off by a factor of a million....it still ain't much.