NH at Jupiter, Planning the Jupiter encounter |
NH at Jupiter, Planning the Jupiter encounter |
Jan 22 2006, 10:57 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 706 Joined: 3-December 04 From: Boulder, Colorado, USA Member No.: 117 |
I think the Jupiter encounter deserves its own thread.
I've just been taking a first look at the Jupiter encounter geometry. You can do the same using Mark Showalter's excellent on-line ephemeris tools at the PDS rings node, which by good fortune happens to include a New Horizons ephemeris (calculated over a year ago) for our actual launch date, January 19th. We'll have an updated ephemeris soon, but this one's already good enough for planning. As Roby72 noted in the Star 48 thread, the satellites are (annoyingly) all on the opposite side of Jupiter at closest approach. We'll still get good views of all sides of Io because Io rotates in only 1.8 days and we'll be pretty close to Jupiter for that long. We'll get fairly good coverage on Europa too, for the same reason. But we won't get very close to Ganymede or Callisto. Luckily Io is our highest priority satellite target and Europa is next, so we'll do OK. |
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Feb 8 2006, 02:22 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
And, the final nail in the Europa-orbit coffin was that Galileo wasn't completely sterilized (although you'd think that the Jovian radiation belts would have finished *that* job*), and there was a perceived contamination risk if it were to crash onto Europa. The easiest and most certain way to make sure that never happened was to ensure that Galileo was destroyed well away from Europa -- hence it was flown to its destruction into Jupiter itself.
-the other Doug -------------------- “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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Feb 15 2006, 05:59 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 307 Joined: 16-March 05 Member No.: 198 |
And, the final nail in the Europa-orbit coffin was that Galileo wasn't completely sterilized (although you'd think that the Jovian radiation belts would have finished *that* job*), and there was a perceived contamination risk if it were to crash onto Europa. The easiest and most certain way to make sure that never happened was to ensure that Galileo was destroyed well away from Europa -- hence it was flown to its destruction into Jupiter itself. Some years ago on one of the Usenet newsgroups one of the more informed members mentioned that some had contemplated a more spectacular end-of-mission for Galileo if only the antenna had not become stuck: a swan dive into Io a la Ranger. "Waaaay back, in the early days of the mission, before the antenna failure, (EDIT: just located an earlier version of the same info by the same author: July 5 1997 in the "Shut Down Probe" thread on the sci.space.history group.) ====== Stephen |
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