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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Cometary and Asteroid Missions _ Spacecraft through the Asteroid belt

Posted by: PhilCo126 Jun 6 2008, 11:52 AM

Let's start a complete listing with the obvious:

Pioneer 10
Pioneer 11
Voyager 1
Voyager 2
Galileo
Cassini-Huygens
New Horizons

NEAR Shoemaker
Deep Space 1
Hayabusa
Dawn
Rosetta (already ?)

not sure about Stardust ...

Posted by: climber Jun 6 2008, 12:12 PM

"Heureux qui comme Ulysses a fait un beau voyage..."
That's the start of one of the most well know french poem.
Could be traduce (if one can traduce poetry) "Happy like Ulysses who had a nice journey..."
I mean, the real Ulysses didn't cross the Asteroid belt

Posted by: mps Jun 6 2008, 12:51 PM

PhilCo, are you sure about NEAR and Hayabusa? I mean, Eros and Itokawa aren't main belt asteroids, but near earth asteroids. Of course, it depends how do you define 'asteroid belt' in this thread.

Posted by: tedstryk Jun 6 2008, 01:52 PM

Yes, Stardust should be on the list. In fact, 5535 Annefrank is a mainbelt asteroid. Also, Mars-7 sent back significant particle and fields data from the asteroid belt, as well as data of Jovian decametric radiation. MPS - you are right about Eros, but Mathilde, the asteroid NEAR flew by, was a main belt asteroid.

Posted by: PhilCo126 Jun 6 2008, 03:21 PM

Indeed, asteroid 253 Mathilde is listed as a main belt asteroid, so NEAR was waltzing Mathilde in the right region for this topic

Posted by: mps Jun 6 2008, 08:47 PM

alright, I didn't know about the close relationship between NEAR and Mathilde (It wasn't so easy to follow NASA missions events back in '97, especially in my country )

Posted by: David Jun 7 2008, 02:49 AM

Perhaps a distinction can be made between missions to and missions through the asteroid belt. I suppose the latter is more-or-less equivalent to "missions that have crossed Jupiter's orbit".

Posted by: PhilCo126 Jun 7 2008, 06:05 PM

253 Mathilde was discovered in 1885 by Johann Palisa. The name is thought to honor the wife of astronomer Moritz Loewy, then the vice director of the Paris Observatory.
253 Mathilde is the largest asteroid to be visited by spacecraft (NEAR in June 1997). It is 52 kilometers in diameter and is approximately four times the size of 951 Gaspra and two times the size of 243 Ida. Ida and Gaspra were visited by the Galileo spacecraft on October 29, 1991 and August 28, 1993 respectively.
Bit strange I don’t find it in the Asteroid listing of “The “Planetary Scientist’s Companion” pages 251-263. It gets a separate page 249