Asteroid Grand Tour |
Asteroid Grand Tour |
Apr 7 2007, 01:31 AM
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8785 Joined: 8-December 05 From: Los Angeles Member No.: 602 |
This article from JPL describes recent efforts to derive a main belt multi-asteroid mission trajectory...any of you orbitsmiths out there have some early thoughts/observations?
-------------------- 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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Apr 8 2007, 11:22 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3648 Joined: 1-October 05 From: Croatia Member No.: 523 |
Well, DI's encounter with Tempel-1 was 10 km/s so that's "only" twice as slow. I don't believe high flyby speeds would be a major drawback here. Most of these bodies are very small so you get spatially resolved datasets only in the immediate vicinity of the target (say a couple of hours) and you're not likely to stick around for much of (rotational) global coverage even with speeds in the 5 km/s range. What I'm saying is the benefit of a slow encounter isn't that great. Of course, you'd really want to put cameras capable of getting more than one image per minute *cough*Cassini*cough* to maximize science return, but even DI had that. The potential for visiting many more targets seems to outweigh this drawback to me.
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