Onwards to Uranus and Neptune! |
Onwards to Uranus and Neptune! |
Jan 12 2008, 09:40 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 813 Joined: 8-February 04 From: Arabia Terra Member No.: 12 |
As soon as MESSENGER gets to Mercury, the most poorly explored planets in the solar system will be Uranus and Neptune. Could this lead to a revival of interest in the ice giants and their retinue, in the same way that the existence of New Horizons is perhaps partly due to the Pluto stamp*?
*via Pluto Fast Flyby and later Pluto Kuiper Express |
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Jan 21 2008, 10:19 AM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
"...I'll always think of them as Mariners 11 and 12......"
My briefcase carries a VERY battered decal of "Mariner Jupiter Saturn". I'll have to take a photo of it and post it. |
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Jan 21 2008, 07:06 PM
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#3
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Interplanetary Dumpster Diver Group: Admin Posts: 4405 Joined: 17-February 04 From: Powell, TN Member No.: 33 |
While imaging systems have certainly improved, Voyager's vidicon imaging was quite good. Much of the "inferior" quality comes from the use of old 1970s and 80s style processing and copying of the images. Also, many of the images are blown up to rather insane levels. The problem for Voyager with the Uranian moons was that when the planet is near solstice, approaching it from a flyby trajectory is like hitting a dartboard - you pass through the plane in which the moons orbit all at once, so you can only have one close encounter (and one more semi-decent one, such as Voyager-2 at Ariel), and all the encounters happen at about the same time. Since Voyager could only hold ~30 frames on its tape recorder and was limited by distance in what it could send in real time, the number of images that could be taken of the Urianian moons was limited. It was correct to say that Miranda would not have been picked for a dedicated Uranus mission - the Voyager team was quite frustrated by this, but it was the only moon that could receive a close flyby and still allow a trajectory that would send the spacecraft on to Neptune. Due to its small size, they were expecting it to be another Mimas, but by luck it turned out to be one of the most interesting worlds Voyager encountered. In fact, during the approach phase, when Voyager was bearing down on the Uranian system but not yet at closest approach, the lions share of the images were spent on Titania, which would likely have received the close encounter had they had the choice.
Voyager-2 at Triton was another spectacular encounter. It seem to me that the coverage seems in many classes cleaner than the coverage of the Galileans. While the increased speed, lower data rate, and lower light levels were an issue, when one looks at Voyager's early encounters, there is a lot of over and under exposure, partial (and total) misses of the target (a lot of close images of the Galileans were off the limb or on the dark side of the terminator), as well as smear from moving the spacecraft in the middle of exposures. While conditions at Neptune were more severe, by this time the Voyager controllers were veteran experts at operating the spacecraft and knew all its idiosyncrasies, rendering it almost like a new mission. -------------------- |
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Jan 21 2008, 07:56 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
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Feb 7 2008, 04:18 PM
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8789 Joined: 8-December 05 From: Los Angeles Member No.: 602 |
I have a sort of Moore's Law optimism for far-future missions that the ability to perform operations rapidly and store everything will increase so that the very crowded encounter sequence can be managed. It would definitely be a challenge with a slower spacecraft. I do too, but am convinced that it will have to come in the form of both increased data-handling capability and major advances in propulsion technology. The whole IT revolution experience makes the idea of sustaining (or re-developing & procuring) the necessary systems to interpret data received decades after launch seems like a significant added consideration. -------------------- A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.
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