Mercury Landers |
Mercury Landers |
Aug 15 2005, 03:36 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 212 Joined: 19-July 05 Member No.: 442 |
While the likelyhood of a Mercury Lander mission is very low, I was wondering if any planning/studies have been done on such a project?
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Guest_Richard Trigaux_* |
Aug 17 2005, 06:11 AM
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#2
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Guests |
JRehling,
your smash and grab idea is interesting. It could be perhaps beterred if the impactor hits the surface with a very low angle, nearby horizontal, so that the plume would be also nearby horizontal. And the main spacecraft would travel right in at low relative velocity, we could perhaps even collect more than dust, little stones. BruceMoomaw, just to get the exact movement of Mercury from a lander would require only little electronics for that lander, just retro rocket and guidance devices, and avoiding heat by landing at night. The payload itself would be just a mirror, similar to the ones placed on the Moon, so that it could easily withstand heat and need no electronics, insulators and the like. A still simpler method, although more speculative, would be to send special reflecting glass balls, protected into a kind of low melting point metal or plastic, and shot this on the ground without retrobraking. With a low enough impact velocity, the casings protects the glass balls. (An additionnal idea would be to fly the glass balls just behind a larger impactor, so that the plume would brake them). Once the sun rises, the casings melt, lefting the glass balls naked, so that they could be used for measuring distance with a laser shot. Not all glass balls would work, but if we send many a fair amount could work. This is not worse than landing the MERs into an airbag! The idea of a lander on Mercury or Venus arises special concerns, due to the extreme heat. Maybe I shall start a thread about the suitable technos for this. |
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