231–240 of 309 posts
Quote from a friend of mine on the team: "After 9.5 years and 6 billion km, we made it to Pluto 72 seconds ahead of schedule." Amazing! The views of Pluto and Charon already reveal how incredibly fascinating this system is. The dichotomy of their surface colours will most definitely lead to further insight into formation processes in the Kuiper Belt. Just such a shame that we can't land this time around. With the vol…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it is much much harder. Especially the survival part Delta-v is literally Physics 101 Landing on Mars is hard, but feasible. Because it has a thick atmosphere to help with the braking Sure, it adds a lot of complications as well, but it is a very good way of slowing your craft enough for other braking systems to work (like rockets, parachutes, etc) Of course, bodies with little atmosphere also have a small gravit…
> No, it is much much harder. Especially the survival part Please elaborate. What is dangerous about a braking burn? Sure, it's harder (because you need to carry that fuel), but not impossible in principle. > Sure, it adds a lot of complications as well, but it is a very good way of slowing your craft enough for other braking systems to work (like rockets, parachutes, etc) I'm sorry, when do rockets not work?
Interesting note, as of today, the US is the first country to have successful spacecraft missions visit all of the classical planets. There is one big exception, of course: the Soviet Union was the first to have a spacecraft visit Earth, with Spunink. This category is completely arbitrary, especially given that Pluto is now considered a minor planet. Still, it's an achievement of note. Mercury - 1974, Mariner 10 Venu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, that was my idea. Or to have NH itself fire off some very tiny instruments that might weight little enough to not go off like an atom bomb when hitting the ground. A GoPro, for example. (I KNOW: NOT AN ACTUAL GOPRO. A small armored camera.) Or a thermometer. The constraint there, though, might be designing equipment that is both very low mass and also capable of talking back to either Earth or the rest of NH as…
I fear that won't work. The speed relative to Pluto during closest approach was 13.78 meters every millisecond, I can't imagine that anything larger than a grain of sand will not behave like a liquid upon impact.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, it is much much harder. Especially the survival part Please elaborate. What is dangerous about a braking burn? Sure, it's harder (because you need to carry that fuel), but not impossible in principle. > Sure, it adds a lot of complications as well, but it is a very good way of slowing your craft enough for other braking systems to work (like rockets, parachutes, etc) I'm sorry, when do rockets not work?
But it is not some fuel, it is more or less the same amount of fuel you need to accelerate the thing. And now you have to accelerate twice as much mass at liftoff requiring even more fuel. Of course requiring even more fuel itself. The tyranny of the rocket equation.
Same arguments apply to Saturn, but "we" managed to get Cassini in orbit. It's a matter of scale, not principle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would put something else in orbit and have high bandwidth communication to it and relay from there.
Putting something else in orbit is the hard part.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it is much much harder. Especially the survival part Delta-v is literally Physics 101 Landing on Mars is hard, but feasible. Because it has a thick atmosphere to help with the braking Sure, it adds a lot of complications as well, but it is a very good way of slowing your craft enough for other braking systems to work (like rockets, parachutes, etc) Of course, bodies with little atmosphere also have a small gravit…
> No, it is much much harder. Especially the survival part Please elaborate. What is dangerous about a braking burn? Sure, it's harder (because you need to carry that fuel), but not impossible in principle. > Sure, it adds a lot of complications as well, but it is a very good way of slowing your craft enough for other braking systems to work (like rockets, parachutes, etc) I'm sorry, when do rockets not work?
see what happened with philae, they got two redundant system to land and both failed.
if the scan reveal pluto to have an usable atmosphere, it will be much much easier to land
however, if you look at the trajectory they used it's an orthogonal encounter [1]
that means the speed they have relative one another is quite much more than when you approach calmly from behind using a hoffman transfer or the like - however if you go that route, instead of waiting 10 years you have to wait a load more, probably more like hundreds (exactly what they did with phila, they approached from the closest orbit possible to minimize the correction burn needed [2])
and let us not forget that having anything in space surviving for soo long is a challenge by itself, as having equipment on earth funded for so long to be maintained operational - remember this story about the other spacecraft that was sent to a comet flyby and was out of gas due leaks on its way back? [3] they had to work a great deal just to rebuild the communication equipement in time
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/New_Hori... [2] http://i.imgur.com/TUkKuhf.gif [3] http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/07/attempt-to-retrieve-nas...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few months ago someone posted on HN about "ballistic capture" to enter a Martian orbit with far less fuel, and I've spent the last few months wondering if you could do that to mosey into a Plutonian orbit: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-way-to-reach...
Part of the reason New Horizons is going so fast is to reach Pluto in "only" ten years. A Hohmann transfer (which you would need to make a ballistic capture) would take about 124 years just to reach Pluto.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting that by sending his remains on that probe we basically guaranteed that at least some human remains will survive millions of years in interstellar space, unless of course, New Horizons collides with something(which I guess it will, given enough time?).
It would be fitting I think if aliens found his ashes considering he's was something of an ET evangelist and eventually claimed some of his mysterious sightings (green fireballs and glowing rectangles moving in unnatural ways) were probably of ET origin and its unscientific to dismiss this out of hand. Wiki: Although our own solar system is believed to support no other life than on Earth, other stars in the galaxy ma…
Quote from a friend of mine on the team: "After 9.5 years and 6 billion km, we made it to Pluto 72 seconds ahead of schedule." Amazing! The views of Pluto and Charon already reveal how incredibly fascinating this system is. The dichotomy of their surface colours will most definitely lead to further insight into formation processes in the Kuiper Belt. Just such a shame that we can't land this time around. With the vol…
Why Uranus?
My "preference" for Uranus simply comes from the hours and hours I've spent trying to model dynamic processes in the system. It's a truly fascinating and in some sense "rapidly" evolving system. I spent my time looking at the tiny moon Mab [1] and I could spend hours telling you about how fascinating it is. If you consider how many other moons and rings there are in the system, it's just a shame to think I might not live long enought to see the undoubtedly incredible discoveries that an orbiter would lead to.
