michaelblume:

chroniclesofrettek:

maddeningscientist:

maddeningscientist:

the saturn system is pretty great

by contrast, jupiter sucks

@eka-mark said: tell us more! what’s so cool about Saturn?

:^)

Saturn has atmospheric helium-3, a relatively light gravity well for a gas giant, and an excellent system of moons.  And pretty rings, just as a bonus.

Jupiter has none of these things, except for helium-3, and it’s horrifically radioactive.  

Europa is the much-vaunted reason to go to Jupiter, but it’s really overrated, especially as a colonization candidate.  If you could dig all the way through its ten miles of ice to get to the ocean, you could set up an underwater base hanging from the ice plate that is the surface, which would be cool as shit, and ten miles of ice would be a radiation shield impervious to anything short of the sun going supernova.

Which is good, because standing on the surface of Europa is approximately the radiation equivalent of standing in the immediate vicinity of the Fukushima reactor during its meltdown incident.  Do not go to Io.

Europa’s hardly the only moon with a subsurface water ocean anyway.  Callisto, which is a further (and therefore less radioactive) moon of Jupiter, might have one.  Ganymede too.  It kind of seems to be a theme with jovian moons, really. 

It’s not just the Jovian moons, though.  Guess who else has a moon with a probable subsurface ocean?  Saturn.  Enceladus has cryovolcanoes and an icy surface and recent data suggests there’s an ocean that spans the whole thing under there.

Like Jupiter, most of Saturn’s moons are tiny rocks that are only called “moons” rather than “asteroids” because they’re orbiting saturn instead of the sun.  That’s a good thing- it’s also the case with mars’s moons.  All of the handy things about asteroids apply to those too.  Having lots of moons is good in general, really, because it means you have lots of objects very “nearby” to one another in space, so each one is easy to reach from the others.

But the real reason to go to saturn is, of course, Titan.

Titan is probably the most habitable place in the solar system, aside from Earth. It has an atmosphere made of 99% nitrogen!  1.5 atm of pressure would take a some getting used to for an earthling, but you can live in 1.5 atmospheres.  It’s cold, cold enough for liquid methane, so you have to wear a really warm coat, but barring significant advancements in spacesuit technology, that’s a lot less encumbering than a full pressure EVA suit.  The thick atmosphere and shielding thanks to saturn’s magnetosphere mean low surface radiation.  As a bonus, the low gravity and high pressure mean you can fly just by strapping wings to your arms.  

From a terraforming perspective, it’s way easier than mars.  You’d just have to warm it up (which the convenient sort of terraforming problem, the sort that can be solved by using lots of nuclear fire) and add oxygen in order to get an earth-like atmosphere.  The surface is covered in ice, so you’d even have water oceans!  It’s like friggin’ Earth Lite.

They make coats that warm?

> As a bonus, the low gravity and high pressure mean you can fly just by strapping wings to your arms.  

Hey spouse look

Tags:

#space #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”hey spouse look”) #(everyone knows Alicorn’s fetish) #but in all seriousness this is a neat post