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Asteroid samples escaping from jammed NASA spacecraft

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Re: Asteroid samples escaping from jammed NASA spacecraft

#71
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of adjusting fuel you can probably compensate by changing when you do the burn. And there are likely to be midcourse corrections anyways.

That makes me wonder: how is it possible to even determine what the correction should be? Space is vast, how do they determine the position of a microscopic vessel precisely enough to know how much to burn?

Multiple correction burns along the way. For equivalent burns, the later along the trajectory the burn, the smaller its net effect on final position. So it's a series of increasingly better approximations.

Try it in ksp. It's quite illuminating to plan your burns and see their effect graphically and build an intuition for celestial mechanics and astrogation.

Re: Asteroid samples escaping from jammed NASA spacecraft

#72

At the original 60oz/$800 million dollars, would that make it the most expensive bit of mineral on Earth in 2023?

Stardust cost 200 million and collected a few grams at most. Hayabusa cost 100 million and collected less than 1 gram. I think those two beat Osiris in price/weight.
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