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_BruceMoomaw_* |
Aug 19 2005, 06:40 AM
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#2
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Guests |
I honestly don't know why they had it in mind, but Stanton Peale's scheme would definitely have involved an active radio beacon. (This is more easily understandable for the Mars Netlanders, since laser reflectors on Mars would quickly get dust-coated.)
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Aug 19 2005, 01:54 PM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Aug 18 2005, 11:40 PM) I honestly don't know why they had it in mind, but Stanton Peale's scheme would definitely have involved an active radio beacon. (This is more easily understandable for the Mars Netlanders, since laser reflectors on Mars would quickly get dust-coated.) Do you mean "why" vs a laser reflector? Mercury is often 1.0 to 1.2 AU from the Earth, and only briefly within 0.7 AU. A laser big enough to be seen after the round-trip (d^4 dispersion of the beam) is either nonexistent or really expensive. This reminds me of one "mission" plan I had: Send a big sheet of reflective foil to Pluto. It would (if it worked) be its own parachute, as light as it was, even in the thin Pluto atmosphere. No instruments, no power. It could be extremely wide. The idea is that it would settle somewhere on Pluto. Then hope that by the end of the long travel time (or later), lasers big enough to reflect off of it would be developed... or just monitor the dimming of the sheet as frosts accumulate on it. |
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