>I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...
...robots gangs... steam jumping... deep into Uranus
NASA is mulling sending a fleet of steam-powered robots, capable of hopping large distances, to Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus to study the surface of the moons. The gizmos, known as Steam Propelled Autonomous Retrieval Robots for Ocean Worlds or SPARROW for short, are quite odd: disc-shaped robots equipped with …
I hope that the bouncy guys have a very good notion of how much ice they have left, and how much it will take to get them back to the lander.
Otherwise, if they run out and are a few miles away from said lander, well, they'll be stuck and that would be too bad. I like the idea of bouncing balls for Science.
"... using chemical propellants as fuel is out of the question ..."
Place: An underground bunker on Titan. Time: The near future.
A bottle green creature leans back in its seat and steeples four of its front appendages. A similar creature crouches before it.
"And the invaders? How are they progressing?"
"Reports say their mother ship is tearing up rock from beneath the surface, melting it and passing it to their attack ships. These ships in turn are vaporising the rock and blasting it down over the surface, before leaping away to attack another district."
"I see. A curious strategy."
"We are receiving similar reports from Europa and Enceladus, Emperor."
The bottle green creature sighs and furrows two of its brows.
"You realise, of course, this means war."
With the temperature on Titan that conversation would likely take decades and their thought processes would be too slow to even notice steam powered bots buzzing around.
I have an old German animation DasRadrorTheWheel.mp4 about two animate piles of rocks who observe human society from stone age to civilisation to the collapse of same. All at a hugely accelerated speed since their thought processes are, um, glacial. I’m reminded of that.
Remember the old story with Earth & the "Aliens" (Jovians?) negotiating. Earth sends a representative to negotiate but neglect to mention it's a robot. The Aliens are shocked by the robustness of the "human" and surrender.
Short story. I forget the title and author, likely 1940s to 1960s.
I wondered, because hardly any of his stories have actual "aliens". I read an explanation once by him as to why this is the case. It's suggested that the people in Nightfall (the original short rather than later expanded novel) are "aliens", not humans.
Aliens of course claim we are Tellurians or Terrans (from the Classical Terra and Tellus) as all sentient, tool using creatures with a proper extendible language are humans. Don't confuse an extendible vocabulary with a language. Rooks are sentient, self aware, can use tools and have a big vocabulary, but are not humans because they don't have Language,
"It could be porous, it might be riddled with crevasses. But SPARROW has total terrain agnosticism; it has complete freedom to travel across an otherwise inhospitable terrain."
So it lands in a crevasse and its thrusters are pointing sideways at the wall. What next?
(I'm sure they've thought of this but the artist's illustration doesn't show a gimbal mount for the thrusters in the cage.)
Article neglected to mention where the energy comes from for this ice-melting and steam generation. As sunlight is scant, especially on Titan and Enceladus, they must use nuclear power, or an RTG. Maybe each football has a conventional battery, but the mothership needs a lot of energy to charge the fleet.
Use of a RTG should rattle certain peoples cages although I'm all for the atom-punk aesthetic myself. I really don't see the problem with certain chemical propulsion (e.g. LOX and Kerosene) although I'l admit we probably don't want to drop unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine onto any putative lifeforms. Orange is so last decade.
... encasing a Mercury lander in tanks of pure water. Landing it on the dark side of Mercury to do some science. When Mercury eventually rotates and the lander gets to be on the sunny side, the deep frozen ice provide a temporary heat shield for some 'sunny side' science, before being used as steam to propel the lander off the planet to be returned to Earth with surface samples?
OK, ok, its is sci-fi, but you never know, some Rocket Scientist out there could be thinking "it might, just, work!"
This is brilliant outside the box {inside the ball?) [okay,most joking aside] thinking on the part of the boffins.
It's still just a concept with details still being studied but for a way to be mobile on an ice moon with an unknown surface consistency and contamination constraints it makes sense versus a traditional wheeled rover which may not be able to grip the ice or, conversely, may get bogged down in snow like ice.
For details see - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7686