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 18 2005, 06:40 AM
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#2
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Guests |
centsworth_II your idea is interesting, but it would not work as it: glass balls or paint drops arriving on Mercury surface at a cosmic speed would simply explode like meteorites. They need some kind of braking, if not an actual landing. For example they could be dropped on the ground from a low orbit.
But that would not be enough, says BruceMoomaw. So what do you need? an accurate reflector like the ones the astronauts installed on the Moon? I recall that these reflectors were made of an array of diamond-shaped pieces of glass, which has the property of sending back any ray of light right in the direction where it came. This is much more accurate and much more efficient (a much larger part of the light is reflected back to the emitter) than with just randomly scattered glass balls. But an already powerfull laser is required to shot at the Moon reflectors; 12 000 000 000 more power would be required to have Mercury with the same devices. This is perhaps the reason why there was no light reflectors on the top of any of the already numerous Martian landers. So BruceMoomaw, what do you need? A radio beacon? It would be much more efficient in power, but less accurate. May an orbiter provide enough accuracy? After all, much info on Mars position may be infered from the radio wave emitted by Mars landers and orbiters, much more anyway than with nothing. So I understand that at least an orbiter around Mercury would provide much more data than nothing. And a lander still more. The ideal would be active laser telemetry (a lander-based laser would reply to an Earth based one) but this would imply to send power lasers in spaceships. Let us have a dream: a powerfull laser geodesic network allowing to know the position of any planet with a micron accuracy... |
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