Solar Orbiter first images revealed

Post by lmm » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 8:17 AM UTC

lattalayta wrote: post #9

Ankaios wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying close to the Sun is hard, both because of the thermal environment and the difficulty of achieving trajectories that get close. A mission that launched two years ago, Parker Solar Probe, is actually going to get closer. Parker and Solar Orbiter have different objectives and should complement each other well. http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/

Ya, at first glance it seems easier to get to the sun, but due to orbital mechanics it's actually harder than it seems. Probes bound for deep-space destinations like Mars can piggyback off Earth’s momentum to fly faster. For a spacecraft to launch toward the sun, on the other hand, it must accelerate to nearly match the Earth’s velocity—in the opposite direction. With the planet’s motion essentially canceled out, the…

Post by jcun4128 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 9:02 AM UTC

Post by op03 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:03 AM UTC

lattalayta wrote: post #9

Ankaios wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying close to the Sun is hard, both because of the thermal environment and the difficulty of achieving trajectories that get close. A mission that launched two years ago, Parker Solar Probe, is actually going to get closer. Parker and Solar Orbiter have different objectives and should complement each other well. http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/

Ya, at first glance it seems easier to get to the sun, but due to orbital mechanics it's actually harder than it seems. Probes bound for deep-space destinations like Mars can piggyback off Earth’s momentum to fly faster. For a spacecraft to launch toward the sun, on the other hand, it must accelerate to nearly match the Earth’s velocity—in the opposite direction. With the planet’s motion essentially canceled out, the…

Post by zaarn » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:21 AM UTC

op03 wrote: post #15

lattalayta wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, at first glance it seems easier to get to the sun, but due to orbital mechanics it's actually harder than it seems. Probes bound for deep-space destinations like Mars can piggyback off Earth’s momentum to fly faster. For a spacecraft to launch toward the sun, on the other hand, it must accelerate to nearly match the Earth’s velocity—in the opposite direction. With the planet’s motion essentially canceled out, the…

Interesting article thx. I dont get why the speed up works only towards the outer solar system though. Why does it have to loose speed to control direction?

Post by zapdrive » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:48 AM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #5

chrisco255 wrote: post #3

Many years ago I experienced a VR tour of the solar system on Oculus. I never fully comprehended just how big the sun was until going on that tour. Something about being able to float around in space, and see the planets stacked next to the sun going off into the horizon and looking up and down and all around at the sun, just a really cool VR exclusive experience. Fascinated to hear what they learn from this orbiter.…

I "hacked" NASA (I used wget/curl to download the publicly available images) to get the specific shots (wavelength/resolution) from SOHO to get an entire 11 day's worth of a single rotation of the sun. We put that sequence into a VR setting. It was strictly for a demo/PoC of an idea we were knocking around. The idea didn't gain any traction with the producers, so it just got shelved. It was fun showing everyone how s…