Gas from Uranus might be a viable source of fuel for long-distance space travel, according to scientists with the Project Icarus.
I’m assuming it could be fuel for a lot of juvenile jokes, too — most of which I’ll try to refrain from making.
Researchers are proposing that methane mined from deep within Uranus — this no-pun thing is a lot harder than I thought it would be — could power interstellar travel in the future.
The destination? A nearby star. But that kind of long-distance trip would mean a spacecraft would need plenty of fuel. The premise proposed by scientists with Project Incarus is to mine gas from Uranus using balloons, then transport it back to Earth.
Adam Crowl, module lead for fuel and fuel acquisition for Project Icarus, writes this for Discovery News:
That the planet which is the butt of so many poor jokes should be relatively rich in methane as well is purely coincidental, but as a mining site it has several advantages. The surface gravity, which is defined from the 1 bar pressure level in a gas giant’s atmosphere, is 90 percent that of Earth’s and the speed needed to reach low orbit is lowest of all the gas planets. Uranus’s rings are also high, thin and not showering the atmosphere below with a hail of meteors, unlike Saturn’s.
Accessing the gas riches of Uranus will require nuclear power, however. Designs exist for nuclear powered ramjets that could fly indefinitely in the atmospheres of the gas giants — this might prove a viable means of keeping an extraction factory aloft.
Uranus is a prime candidate for mining because it lacks Jupiter’s gravitational pull, Saturn’s hazardous rings and it is closer than Neptune.
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