I dont think you can do that to any great precision for New Horizons yet since it will have further trajectory correction maneuvers, and possibly a "fairly big one" to target a KBO post Pluto flyby. Small changes now will have a great a great impact on the position 100 years in the future.

NH's hyperbolic excess will be around 45,000km/h, give or take a bit, so I think you can say that it will "overtake" Pioneer 10 (40,000km/h) & Pioneer 11 (37,000km/h), but it will never "catch-up" with Voyager 1 (60,000km/h) or Voyager 2 (54,000km/h)

There is info about the star motor third stage position earlier in this thread (sorry haven't had the time to locate it precisely).

Thanks for such a wonderful program!

My thanks and gratitude to a member of this forum for putting in a lot of effort into this issue. It turned out that my ISP-hosted website had indeed been hacked, and that it was possible that some visitors may have been led to a fake anti-virus page. My apologies for that. The issue seems to have been resolved now and full functionality of the affected webpage will be reinstated in due course, along with even more system monitoring than before. What a pain, takes the fun out of telling spaceflight stories!

Is there a list of these events somewhere? I would love to put them into the Cassini timeline (even though Cassini may not be observing them), and try and recreate it using the Solar System Simulator pics I include in the realtime simulations.

Ulysses has just been switched off in good config (i.e. all off except receiver and sun tracker) if I understood the broadcast correctly. Farewell

There was a somewhat distant Earth flyby of Epoxi on 29 June at some 1.3 million km ... distant yet Epoxi is still closer to Earth than Planck is at the moment. Next close-ish approach at the end of the year

As you may know I operate a realtime simulation website, and thus have come to face some of the annoyances with it. They have included search bots that access all pages at the same time which is a real headache for my loading intensive realtime simulations (these a rogue bots ... Yahoo and Google spread their requests over time), down to outright data fishing requests (query strings like ../../../password). Unfortunately that has led to me having to block quite a range of IP addresses and even some countries from where no legitimate request came from. BUT ...

There is one frequently occurring mystery which I just dont seem to understand; maybe others who manage websites have seen the same and know what it is. I log which pages are accessed, and monitor some of the variables in the query string (the stuff after the '?' in the url). Whilst allowed values include missions like voyager2 and cassini, there are many requests looking for a mission called

?mission=http://owned-nets.blogspot.com/2009/04/crim-net.html?please_click_on_my_google_ads
[I dont suggest you visit that site]

Is this some weird form of phishing or anything like that? I just dont understand what the purpose of this could be. Because it's in the query string it won't be posted anywhere anyway. Has anybody else seen this before? Would be keen to know what it all means.

From the mission ops blog:

Man I saw the launch live at Cape Canaveral. I was still in high school then. Now I have 3 kids, the oldest half-way through primary. And the mission lasted for that long. Amazing.

Of particular interest if you live in Asia, or happen to be there on 22 July 2009. Extensive information available at http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEmono/TSE2009/TSE2009.html and http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEpubs/20090722/rp.html

I also have some solar system simulator screenshots at my Earth seen from the Sun page, scroll all the way down at http://www.dmuller.net/cosmology/sunearth.php

All the LCROSS action was after closest approach ... closest approach to the Moon was around the time of the LRO orbit insertion. The camera feed started some 2 to 3 hours after c/a. So what we've seen is a departing movie from the Moon.


Me too. Still remember when suddenly no pics came back anymore ...

Thanks SpaceListener for the suggestions; I appreciate such input because I do miss obvious stuff (occasionally) :-) I will work them in when time permits. This mission somehow slipped under my radar, for one it's not quite exactly interplanetary, and I only recently and by accident found the type of trajectory data which I need for my simulations to work.

As for the final impact timeline, if memory serves me right, it is the Centaur that will hit first, creating a plume through which LCROSS will fly through. LCROSS follows 10 minutes behind the Centaur, allowing for 4 minutes of measurements in the plume ... or something like that.

Will work on this mission shortly.

I hope they will have this for the lunar impact on 9 Oct!

DEFINITELY!

Managed to quickly create a LCROSS realtime simulation:
http://www.dmuller.net/realtime/realtime.php?mission=lcross

I have not yet been able to verify the trajectory data but the output seems reasonable

good blog. twitter not updating. nasa tv sound is very weak

EDIT ... NTV try media channel. seems better than public channel

It's about to start now .... 5:20am EDT ... as indicated on Twitter. LCROSS I think is at 5:20 PDT

EDIT: LRO coverage has started on NTV media channel

EDIT2: Apologies I havent been able to create a realtime simulation for it ... a very interesting side effect of using javascripts in there is that the times are automatically converted into local time! I will try for LCROSS, but cant promise

Thirded

And just to complain a little more, it took me ages to realize that ET is not (always) Eastern Time but Ephemeris Time.

So the transmission starts at 5:21:06 am ET EDT ERT

Beautiful! And we're nearly there, 75 days and 57 million km to go ... historic realtime simulation (well, 30 years "late")

I found the following references to the Pluto Ephermeris issue on the NAIF website, quoted and highlighted below. Keep in mind the relative speed at C/A of 14km/sec or so (if I'm not mistaken) ... if you snap a pic just a second too late, you're 14km off. Pluto has a diameter of 2,200km, or 2.6 minutes at the above speed. Of course that is at C/A, it's probably less dramatic as you approach, but still, minor uncertainties seem to translate to a lot of headache anyway.



And to compare the accuracy of orbit knowledge across the solar system:


Interesting stuff.

I will be watching Herschel & Planck! NASA got the better replays :-) Also trying to see whether my website can handle "live" launch coverage ... or rather, whether it can handle if the launch is delayed at short notice, which I really dont hope for!

Pioneer 11 had a fairly close flyby of Atlas at 45,960km on 1 Sep 1979 15:06:32. To put it into perspective ... Cassini got closer to Atlas only once so far AFAIK!


I suspect that time is ET, which converts to 16:29:44 UTC. That's just 10 seconds off the times in Horizons. And at the time of C/A, the altitude doesnt change much so I'd take both times as being "equal enough" :-)

was only put in last year. First time the shadows have fallen that way.
... then it's not a rover, its ... Phoenix!

well the shadow on the right look a bit like the Lunar Module (LM) of the Apollo missions. And the two dark spots above the "rover cam" could well be Pathfinder and a copy of it which the Martians have been trying to build.

EDIT: Astro0 ... how many years have you been working there by now? And it only just appeared?

"Astronautics" on Twitter seems to have been affected as well: http://twitter.com/Astronautics

They suspect it to be a Nigerian scam. I am subscribed to that Cassini list as well, but have not received anything. Astronautics says that there are some links in those emails with are better not be clicked on.

On that note, I did notice some unusual crawling activities on my website lately. Guess they were fishing for email addresses!