Could Saturn's rings be colonized?

[Pds314]

I was thinking about a hypothetical colony on Saturn's rings, particularly the B ring, and I think it could really be an interesting option. Benefits include:

Huge tracts of land: billions of square kilometers of almost-flat stuff orbiting in lock step within a given altitude range.

Weak gravity from the aforementioned stuff keeps it together. This also prevents dropped objects from floating away too far. (Need to do more maths on the exact strength of this gravity at different altitudes above the ring.)

Protection from space debris: any object which is on an orbit passing through the B ring will immediately encounter tonnes per square meter of ring, meaning nothing can linger around for more than half an orbit if it will encounter the ring. Any micrometeroid will very quickly be incorporated into the ring.

Lots and lots of mass. The ring masses 2.4*10^19 kg. That's about 2% the mass of Earth's oceans, mostly within a few meters of the void of space for easy access.

Longest mountain range in the solar system: the outer edge of the B ring is covered in 2.5-kilometer-high objects fairly close together.

Mass scale construction possibilities: you could build highways, pipelines, particle accelerators, cities, railways, etc all in low gravity with abundant materials.

No horizon: once something is a kilometer or two off the ring, it can likely see and be seen from Earth radii away.

No need to be concerned about weight: million tonne buildings are perfectly viable yet don't need to be designed with gravity in mind.

 

 

Anyway. What do people think, is it possible to colonize Saturn's rings? What would make it a more or less attractive option? Has anyone done the maths on gravity from the ring?

[Spaceception]

Maybe for unmanned mining equipment to very easily get water ice and metals, but if you came all that way to Saturn just to colonize the rings, I find that a waste of time, just go to Titan.

However, O'Neill colonies could easily be built from those materials, and be placed in orbit around Saturn, so they could be used as Interstellar generation ships.

 

EDIT: I just realized I accidentally made something of an Interstellar reference

Edited October 4, 2016 by Spaceception

[insert_name]

if I'm correct what you are proposing is to build tunnels connecting the large parts of the rings of Saturn. You realize the reason the rings are there is because they are within Saturn's Roche limit, meaning that large bodies would definitely be torn apart.

[Pds314]

27 minutes ago, insert_name said:

if I'm correct what you are proposing is to build tunnels connecting the large parts of the rings of Saturn. You realize the reason the rings are there is because they are within Saturn's Roche limit, meaning that large bodies would definitely be torn apart.

Well yes, but so is, f.e. the international space station. Structures would be long horizontally but thin altitudinally.

[Pds314]

1 hour ago, Spaceception said:

Maybe for unmanned mining equipment to very easily get water ice and metals, but if you came all that way to Saturn just to colonize the rings, I find that a waste of time, just go to Titan.

However, O'Neill colonies could be built from those materials, and be placed in orbit around Saturn, so they could be used as Interstellar generation ships.

Besides gravity and an extremely cold atmosphere, what's the reason to go to Titan? Seems to me that Titan presents more problems than it solves, like having an extremely cold atmosphere that's also very dense, this would require suits to deal with positive pressure from the outside.

[cubinator]

8 minutes ago, Pds314 said:

Besides gravity and an extremely cold atmosphere, what's the reason to go to Titan? Seems to me that Titan presents more problems than it solves, like having an extremely cold atmosphere that's also very dense, this would require suits to deal with positive pressure from the outside.

Well, 1.5 atm isn't quite as bad as 90 atm on Venus...

[Pds314]

29 minutes ago, cubinator said:

Well, 1.5 atm isn't quite as bad as 90 atm on Venus...

True. Although the density is much more than 1.5x Earth's. Venus us an entirely different beast, and even though one might be able to make some kind of crazy heat-resistant dive suit out of maraging steel to walk on the surface and land a prop plane there, it would be tough. I once wrote a semi-detailed mission profile for a Venus landing that basically involved a plane using a propeller engine to go from sea level to the <<1 atmosphere level and then releasing a return rocket to reach orbit and rendezvous with the return stage. The entire thing was intended to involve 2 Saturn V-sized rockets, one for the transfer and return stages and one for the plane, crew, orbital command module, etc which would go up with the wings folded to fit in a payload fairing. The plane would contain a spherical or almost spherical maraging steel sphere and an inflatable return capsule but would otherwise be porous to atmosphere. I originally had thought the atmosphere muggy be prohibitively caustic, but then discovered that even fairly ordinary materials can withstand exposure to acids fairly easily. The idea for the pressure sit would be to have a thin, ribbed managing steel suit, as small as possible because volume would be a premium, and the minimum mass the suit could have is proportional to volume. The idea would be to have multilayer vacuum insulation spanning the gap, and extremely good heat pumps for eliminating waste heat. I also debated a swing wing configuration, but then realized it would probably be cheaper to just bring more fuel, and that such a configuration would only improve efficiency, not significantly improve stall speed, and more importantly, only make a significant improvement when the primary source of drag is lift-induced drag. That's a set of conditions that basically don't exist near the surface, since the stall speed of anything would be a 8 times lower than on Earth, and the primary source of drag would be the base drag of the plane at any reasonable speed.

 

Although I definitely believe a manned Venus mission could be done, Colonizing the land on Venus seems almost impossible.

Edited October 4, 2016 by Pds314

[luizopiloto]

All depends of how often the asteroids there hit each other... and probably the density of micrometeorites. this are the most important factors to maintain anything inside that rings...

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, Pds314 said:

The ring masses 2.4*10^19 kg.

Icy moon diameter = ((2.4*10¹⁹/1000)*6/pi)^1/3 = 360 km.

Looks cheaper to build a dwarf fortress inside an icy moon.

[Pds314]

13 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Icy moon diameter = ((2.4*10¹⁹/1000)*6/pi)^1/3 = 360 km.

Looks cheaper to build a dwarf fortress inside an icy moon.

Lol, okay. That icy moon is a gravitationally-rounded body. That's not exactly the same thing as millions of billions of little ice-teroids, not unless you can blow the moon to smithereens first, and if you can, you've got worse problems. At some point, icy planet 120,000 km wide weighs 5*10^26 kg, doesn't mean it can be used for anything.

Edited October 4, 2016 by Pds314

[kerbiloid]

5 minutes ago, Pds314 said:

not unless you can blow the moon to smithereens first

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_carpet

 

Spoiler

 

Edited October 4, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Ethanadams]

@kerbiloid nuke it from orbit?

[Bill Phil]

17 hours ago, insert_name said:

if I'm correct what you are proposing is to build tunnels connecting the large parts of the rings of Saturn. You realize the reason the rings are there is because they are within Saturn's Roche limit, meaning that large bodies would definitely be torn apart.

The Roche Limit is a limit for a gravitationally bound structure (and it's different depending on which body you're referring to, one moon would have a slightly different Roche Limit than another, for example). Mechanically bound structures aren't as affected.

Edited October 4, 2016 by Bill Phil

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, Ethanadams said:

nuke it from orbit?

No, excavate it from inside.

[mikegarrison]

10 hours ago, Ethanadams said:

@kerbiloid nuke it from orbit?

Well, that *is* the only way to be sure.

[wumpus]

On 10/3/2016 at 11:20 PM, luizopiloto said:

All depends of how often the asteroids there hit each other... and probably the density of micrometeorites. this are the most important factors to maintain anything inside that rings...

The rings are amazingly thin, essentially having zero width on any meaningful astronautical distance (which I think means meters, but it might be a bit wider).  You could sit just above/below the rings and pick the ones you wanted without really being in danger (of course, any colony would eventually perturb things a bit...).  I can't imagine this being a place to inhabit, but you wouldn't be in danger from the rings themselves.

[magnemoe]

It would be an good source for raw materials but I would put the habitat outside the ring, make it easier to match orbit with it

[Scotius]

Would you want to colonise drifting ice in Arctica? It's a good place for science outpost, but not house.

[kerbiloid]

14 hours ago, wumpus said:

but you wouldn't be in danger from the rings themselves.

Until he disturbs the rings and gets an IceKessler orbital storm.

[lajoswinkler]

You're forgetting something. Ionizing radiation. I don't know its intensities but it's safe to assume they're serious even though the main rings aren't inside the main ionizing radiation belts.

Note that Cassini never directly probed the environment inside the D ring, but has discovered there is a belt there, too.

 

(This graph shows the energetic ion and electron data from the Saturn orbit insertion interval on June 30 and July 1, 2004. Ion intensity is shown above the horizontal divider as energy increasing upward. Electron intensity is shown below the horizontal divider as energy increasing downward, as measured by the magnetospheric imaging instrument's low energy magnetospheric measurement system sensor onboard the Cassini spacecraft. Red indicates high particle intensity, blue is low intensity. The vertical energy scales run from 30 kilo-electron volts to several mega-electron volts. Time runs from left to right, with approximately 36 hours of data shown, covering a distance range from Saturn's center between 783,000 kilometers (487,000 miles) at either end, down to about 78,000 (49,000 miles) at closest approach.

The region above the rings was found to be devoid of ions and electrons; the region inside the D-ring inner edge was not directly sampled and absent the magnetospheric imaging instrument ion and neutral camera remote sensing would have been assumed empty of energetic particles.)

 

Reaching them and then stopping there would be incredibly difficult and it's a pretty good bet ionizing environment is absolutely lethal unless you're in a bulky lead suit because all those electrons smashing into you (attenuated enough by metal only) would produce serious bremsstrahlung x-rays.

Edited October 6, 2016 by lajoswinkler

[GDJ]

Based on the illustrations Titan would be a bit of a stretch and any colony will need some shielding as well, let alone the inner moons.

[Steel]

1 hour ago, GDJ said:

Based on the illustrations Titan would be a bit of a stretch and any colony will need some shielding as well, let alone the inner moons.

Based on those illustrations, Titan is just about the worst place to be in the whole system!

[GDJ]

3 hours ago, Steel said:

Based on those illustrations, Titan is just about the worst place to be in the whole system!

I'd take Titan over Venus any day. As for shielding, that's what Lead is for.

Cold is far easier to work with. Heat is a real PITA.

[kerbiloid]

If they presume subsurface life on Europa (which is exactly in Jupiter's radiation belt), what's problem with Titan subsurface dwelleres?

And rather than Europa, Titan has the dense atmosphere , and if it also has a subsurface ocean, it would be rich withf N and C compounds.

Edited October 7, 2016 by kerbiloid

[todofwar]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

If they presume subsurface life on Europa (which is exactly in Jupiter's radiation belt), what's problem with Titan subsurface dwelleres?

And rather than Europa, Titan has the dense atmosphere , and if it also has a subsurface ocean, it would be rich withf N and C compounds.

Ice is far better at shielding I would think, definitely better than any gas. Really shielding breaks down to a simple question of mass, and solids are denser hence better. Lead is so good because it's dense as hell.