ESA Rosetta, news, updates and discussion |
ESA Rosetta, news, updates and discussion |
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#1
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![]() Member ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 562 Joined: 29-March 05 Member No.: 221 ![]() |
Well Rosetta isn't going to get to 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Chury) till 2014, but it's not to early to set up a thread. There are a bunch of earth fly-bys, a Mars encounter at 200km in 2007 and a few asteriod passes. Not to mention the mission to land on the comet itself.
Only another nine and a half years to go. |
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Guest_Analyst_* |
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#2
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Correct. This is a flagship. It will give us much more return than Deep Impact, Contour and Stardust combined.
Not to discount the samples from Stardust or the possibility to study 3 different comets with Contour. But long term study is the key. To see the change, not to take snapshots. Using a suite of instruments. You can repeat observations to answer new questions. This is something Contour or Deep Impact could not do. Deep Impact in particular has been a big disappointment. For me it looked more like an engineering demonstration than a science mission. Stardust is a little bit different: There you have the material and can study it again and again. But these very short flybys should be something of the past (This is even true for New Horizons, but hey, there is no way to orbit Pluto, so you must flyby). If I look at Discovery missions so far, many did carry only very limited instruments: MPF, Stardust, Contour, Deep Impact. On the other hand, orbiters were much more productive: NEAR, Lunar Prospector, hopefully Messenger and Dawn (although Dawns instruments are very limited too). Genesis is a little bit different, but Kepler has a very limited scope too. I go as far and say: One flagship like Cassini (3 billion $) gives you much more return than 8 Discovery missions (400 million $ each). Discovery missions need a very large amount of their budget just to built the spacecraft bus and launch it. The science instruments are only tiny fraction. This relationship get better the bigger the mission. Analyst |
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