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New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

bbc.co.uk

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Re: New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

#301

Post by vilmosi »

EarthLaunch wrote: post #281
vilmosi wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> You'll be rapidly overwhelmed by bragging from Europeans, about how they're superior. Very few of those people are actually European. For one, nobody introduces themselves as European :) I heard they're just American teenagers trying to troll people.

I have a habit of checking the profiles of people who brag about how Europe is superior - such as by saying Europeans aren't posting such comments. You can try it; most are European. Such as yourself.

Well obviously I made the mistake of not considering comments like mine as bragging.

Re: New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

#302

Post by raverbashing »

drjesusphd wrote: post #235
danbruc wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it's hard. I understand that. But not impossible. Same arguments apply to Saturn, but "we" managed to get Cassini in orbit. It's a matter of scale, not principle.

Yeah, but Saturn is at approx. 1/4 of the distance to Pluto and it used a different process to intersect to Saturn's orbit, taking more time to get there

New Horizons got to Jupiter after ONE year

Re: New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

#303

Post by pluma »

moistgorilla wrote: post #144
pluma wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... which we do. Your point being?

We owe nothing to China considering we pay them

"Owing" something is not always about money. "The West" owes a large part of its wealth to Africa and Asia. It's a team effort, not just a business transaction.

Re: New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

#304

Post by murbard2 »

kijin wrote: post #283
umeshunni wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sensor will need to send data back, so it can't be too light weight.

The signal only needs to reach the mothership, not Earth. Example: Philae communicated with Earth via Rosetta.

Yes but Rosetta orbited the comet, whereas in this case the probe would just zoom past the planet

Re: New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

#305

Post by david-given »

Retric wrote: post #151
david-given wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a UK citizen living in Switzerland, I have to ask: what is a high school pep rally?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pep_rally It's really just a time filler to cover the gap between when classes end and a school game begins. Growing up in the US I think we had ~1 or 2 per year from ~8th-12th grade. They were also generally fairly short as in 10-15 minutes with I think one lasting 45 when the other team was late. PS: Most games did not take place during the school day, but I think they scheduled a few…

Frankly, that sounds pretty creepy --- it looks to me like an outright indoctrination session.

I couldn't imagine my school in Scotland doing anything similar (and we were a very sporty school, with compulsory attendance at a lot of inter-school games, which I mostly sneaked away from).

Re: New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

#306

Post by smackfu »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #241
smackfu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is when people zoom in and "see" things in the JPEG compression artifacts. Also when they release the pic on Twitter in crappy form before they release it in uncompressed form.

It says png on the file and headers.

Ah, it does! They did the original "sneak peak" on Instagram and this was the file: https://igcdn-photos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/t51.28...

I hear so many complaints about Twitter recompressing pics I figured that would happen here.

Re: New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

#307

Post by HopDavid »

kartikkumar wrote: post #253
eastbayjake wrote: post #209

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...

My boss co-authored that paper [1] :) Ballistic capture is interesting: makes use of fuzzy/chaotic dynamics in the 3-Body Problem. I worked on analysis of the Weak Stability Boundary, which is the mathematical set of all points in phase-space that lie at this fuzzy boundary, for my Masters thesis [2]. It has been used in a few missions, including SMART-1, Stardust, and Hiten. ESA's Bepi-Colombo mission will also be u…

When mass parameter is big, use of WSBs is interesting. But mass parameters for sun-earth or sun-Mars are tiny. I've expressed my skepticism for ITN between earth and Mars: http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2015/04/potholes-on-interpl...

Re: New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

#308

Post by TeMPOraL »

pluma wrote: post #303
moistgorilla wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We owe nothing to China considering we pay them

"Owing" something is not always about money. "The West" owes a large part of its wealth to Africa and Asia. It's a team effort, not just a business transaction.

True, but I meant a particular subset of "owing" in which you consider which parties are directly responsible for some event. Paid out vendors are usually not considered the primary parties.

Re: New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

#309

Post by markman »

ceejayoz wrote: post #172
grinich wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bullet travels about 1,700 MPH. New Horizons is going about 36,300 MPH. The probe weighs 480 kilograms, so it's kinetic energy is approximately 63.2 Gigajoules. For reference, this is like 15 tonnes of TNT released on impact. Hard to make something that survives those kind of conditions.

Plus, probes that far out have worse-than-dialup transmission rates. It takes 42 minutes to return a single photo from the LORRI camera. Bursting large amounts of data out in a short period of time before impact isn't feasible. http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0130080...

Ahhhh you said probe.
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