r-Selecting Tiny Probes to Shotgun Into Saturn’s Rings

For NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, Dr. Michael Rubenstein is proposing a radical rethinking of Saturn exploration: instead of one expensive, heavily protected spacecraft, launch ten thousand femtosatellites—probes so tiny that modern cubesats would dwarf them. Saturn's rings are a gauntlet of dust, debris, and ice that would almost certainly destroy a traditional spacecraft. Send enough of them and statistics suggests at least some will survive and transmit data. Per Hackaday, Rubenstein's concept applies an ecological principle called r-selection—the same strategy sea turtles employ, laying hundreds of eggs and accepting that most won't survive.

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