This is Ganymede. It is one of Jupiter’s moons and more importantly, it is the moon my team has landed on. (Problem statement) Our team must design an efficient transportation method on a foreign celestial body, both without wasting excess energy and without wasting time, capable of a 5-kilometre-long round trip on Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons. This vehicle must handle extreme conditions including temperatures as low as -180C, low gravity(a tenth of Earth’s), rocky terrain, and interference from the planet’s magnetic field affecting electronics.
My team chose Ganymede because of its high gravity relative to the other given options. We also made this decision due to the fact that it has oxygen and that the terrain is mostly flat compared to some others.
We are presented with many different opportunities for travel within this new planet. Through brainstorming we have come up with plans such as using a combustion engine because of the oxygen availability within Ganymede meaning we would only need to bring CO2. Another plan that we briefly discussed was that because Ganymede has around a ninth of the gravitational pull of earth, we would be able to create a very efficient drill due to the surface layer not being nearly as condensed. One problem with that plan is that if Ganymede is much older than earth, or made out of some other substance then the surface layer would be just as if not harder to drill through than the earth. Another opportunity would be to have some sort of machine like a maglev or a plane that would be much easier to function in the low gravity of Ganymede.
The first hurdle that we need to overcome would be figuring out what type of travel we are going to use. If we were to use air travel, the atmosphere on Ganymede is so thin that the plane may not be able to create enough thrust to go forward efficiently, making it a much less effective method of travel. If we were to use travel by ground, we would need to tackle how to create something to efficiently traverse the cratered, grooved terrain without going too fast and getting flung out of the atmosphere but also be able to be light and fast enough to go over the bumpy grooves and navigate around craters. It would also need to be compact in order to reserve fuel. My team’s third option is to travel by water. Underneath the crust of Ganymede, there is an ocean that stretches across the entire surface area of the moon. If we were to construct a submarine in order to traverse this underwater ocean, it could be the fastest and most efficient means of transportation. The challenge that we foresee with this option is that we would need to create some sort of drill attachment in order to destroy the crust of ice.
My team has gathered secondary sources taken from satellites that have obtained information such as photos and heat. To go more in depth on the tools used that got us where we are today with Ganymede, it was first discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei using a telescope. Long after this discovery, the Hubble Space Telescope, or HST for short, was launched into space in April of 1990. This groundbreaking telescope had shown the first up close images of Ganymede. Six years later in 1996, The Galileo Spacecraft did a flyby of Ganymede which uncovered mass amounts of information. Some of this information includes the fact that Ganymede generates its own magnetic field from its core. Other information that was found that ties more into my team’s research is that the Galileo Spacecraft discovered a massive amount of Ganymede’s landscape and geography.
Bibliography:
Shematovich, V. (2016) Neutral atmosphere near the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. https://research.ebsco.com/c/m7jfwd/viewer/pdf/lc442tiubz
Kivelson, Margaret G.;Jia, Xianzhe;Lee, Karen A.;(2023) The Europa Clipper Magnetometer. https://research.ebsco.com/c/m7jfwd/viewer/html/664tfuhwcn
James, Philip B.;Lee, Steven W. (1999) HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS OF PLANETS AND SATELLITES. https://research.ebsco.com/c/m7jfwd/viewer/pdf/tdi4easgvb
Goddard Space Flight Center (2018) New Results from Galileo’s First Flyby of Ganymede: Reconnection-Driven Flows at the Low-Latitude Magnetopause Boundary, Crossing the Cusp, and Icy Ionospheric Escape Https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20190002456
Littleton, Joshua A. H.;Secco, Richard A.;Yong, Wenjun (2021) Thermal Convection in the Core of Ganymede Inferred from Liquid Eutectic Fe-FeS Electrical Resistivity at High Pressures. https://research.ebsco.com/c/m7jfwd/viewer/pdf/smghbm5a3n
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