[X] My Assistant

[Phil Stooke]

I like asking questions, and where better than a place like this?

So here's one... Mars Climate Orbiter burned up during a too-low pass through the atmosphere. So where would its debris have fallen?

This ought to be a fairly straightforward question to answer. We presumably know, or can find, the details of its trajectory as it approached Mars. We know the orientation of Mars at the time. The location of periapsis in Mars coordinates ought to be easy to find. This might be buried in a technical report somewhere, or it might be possible to figure it out with one of the solar system simulator type programs. Can anybody help answer this?

(if so, we can extend it to Pioneer Venus and Magellan later in a separate thread)

Phil

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Unfortunately, the official report indicates that we're not even sure it DID crash on Mars -- its remains may not have lost enough velocity even to avoid continuing into solar orbit, let alone going into orbit around Mars. So the short answer is: we'll never know, and it may well be scattered over a large part of the planet.

[infocat13]

Unfortunately, the official report indicates that we're not even sure it DID crash on Mars -- its remains may not have lost enough velocity even to avoid continuing into solar orbit, let alone going into orbit around Mars.  So the short answer is: we'll never know, and it may well be scattered over a large part of the planet.

Indeed phil is right this is a great place for questions,
here is mine.
Mars observer another lost spacecraft is belived to have sufferd a fuel line explosion as it neared a flyover of the martian north pole.(where on the space craft was the fuel line in relation to its line of flight? The accident board tells of the space craft being in solar orbit (2) would not this place the space craft in an orbit just "south" of the plane of the ecliptic? (3) how much delta vie would an explosion have imparted on mars observer?
a large enough explosion would have left mars observer scatterd all over the martion polar regions perhaps.or itself melted and skipped of the atmoshere and back into space.but then a fuel line located on the space craft facing downward towards the planet on its line of flight would have alterd the orbit higher.
As for the climate orbiter was it intended orbit a polar one as well?

I with jonathen mcdowell at harvard have an interest in this subject as history of space flight.I had a conversation with him years ago about some conversations I had in the mid 90's with atrodynamics/mission design folks at JPL in reguards to the locations of the voyager and pioneer solid upperstages.I think these are in solar system escape orbits.

steven

[mcaplinger]

Indeed phil is right this is a great place for questions,
here is mine.
Mars observer another lost spacecraft is belived to have sufferd a fuel line explosion as it neared a flyover of the martian north pole...

The most likely outcome stated by the Coffey board in 1993 was that MO was spun up to a high rate by helium expelled from a blown propellant line. The delta v this would impart could end up averaging to near-zero. I tried to get people to seach for MO in 2000 when it would have approached to about 0.2 AU from the Earth, but it was very dim, and I couldn't interest anyone in spending telescope time on such a long shot.

A paper written in 2001 by Carl Guernsey of JPL, though ( http://www.klabs.org/richcontent/Reports/F...y_a01-34322.pdf )
suggests it was more likely that MO suffered contamination in the He pressure regulator and that the oxidizer tank just exploded, which would have blown the spacecraft into pieces.