Mars orbiter FLOORS IT to avoid hitting MOON The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft last week made a hasty burn to avoid a likely collision with Martian moon Phobos. NASA says that without the burn, the probe and the moon stood “a good chance of hitting each other on Monday, March 6th”. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) figured that out about …
Yes, space is so vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is (you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space) and since there are only a finite number of space probes in space then the probability of one meeting another is so infinitessimally small then this occurrence can be ignored
See http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html. It is subtitled "A Tediously Accurate Map of the Solar System". It's not that accurate - it lines all the planets up in straight line, and has a lot of extra text to relieve the monotony. It is very tedious if you try to scroll all the way through (I gave up)
I was a bit surprised to see, at 7.2 light minutes out from the Sun a comment about being half way home. My understanding is that Earth is about 8 light minutes out from the Sun, so not sure quite which laws of Physics are being followed by "Josh" here.
That's a crappy repository for code dependencies and a crappier associated build system. No surprise they sent it out to Mars, but I don't get why they then saved it from oblivion!
(We used Ivy instead - so much better but requires water, oxygen and sunlight to grow so not so good for Mars visits)
So now we are cluttering up the space around another plant with junk. Before any company/government/agency puts anything into an orbit (Earth, Mars, or anything) there should be a plan in place for them to remove the object before end-of-life occurs. With smaller satellites around Earth that can mean planned orbital decay where they can burn up in the atmosphere, but this would not work on Mars. Options would be:
1) use thrusters to leave orbit and head out into the void
2) remain in orbit as a future navigation hazard, or
3) have the space junk scattered over the surface of Mars.
Any other solutions?
4) Teraform Mars, creating a nice atmosphere, then drop the junk satellites out of orbit to burn up.
And use more cubesats so they burn up more completely.
5) Create a rift in the time-space continuum, then shove all our space junk into that hole, then seal it up!
I see no problem what so ever with that method. :P
There are 21000 significant objects in Earth orbit - I'll ignore the untrackables - with no roundabouts or traffic lights, and we don't have major problems with satellite collisions. How come under 20 "vehicles" around Mars appears so much more difficult to manage?
There's going to be some obscure orbital mechanics answer isn't there ...?
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