As Professor Proton always says, there is no problem you can't solve if you use your noggin.
Orbital boffins cut four years off NASA mission to shiniest object in the Solar System
NASA has come up with a cunning plan that will allow it to shave four years of flight time off its mission to the biggest chunk of visible iron in the Solar System, and will use souped-up solar power to get there. In January NASA approved the mission to send a probe out to the asteroid 16 Psyche, which is thought to be a …
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Thursday 25th May 2017 14:39 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: 2024!!
Ah, but can you actually eat food that's designed to last that long?
I rememeber reading a few years ago that the US Department of Defense were dead chuffed with themselves for creating the MRE pizza. Yup that's a heat-in-the-bag pizza with a 3 year shelf-life. Yum!
I guess it's a bit like after your plane's crashed in a remote location. And you've run out of other passengers to eat and are forced to [the horror, the horror] eat the airline "food".
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This post has been deleted by its author
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Thursday 25th May 2017 10:16 GMT cray74
Re: Orbiting the object?
Object is big enough to put the satalite into a useful orbit?
16 Psyche has an escape velocity of 159m/s and thus a low altitude orbital velocity of about 110ms (260mph). That's not something you'd ignore like Rosetta at 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, but rather a gravity field that will consume tens of meters per second of propellant during capture and potentially hundreds for significant plane changes.
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Thursday 25th May 2017 16:27 GMT DNTP
Re: Orbiting the object?
16 Psyche isn't a small object until you start comparing it with dwarf stars. It represents ~1% of the total mass of the asteroid belt and is iron-rich, meaning that it is very dense for its geometric dimensions. Therefore, relative to its radius it has a significantly larger gravitational sphere of influence than a water/carbon/silicon body of either similar mass or similar dimensions.
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Thursday 25th May 2017 11:17 GMT lglethal
Arrggghhhh....
Is probably the cry from the satellite design team when they just found out they've had a year removed from their design and testing plan. Not to mention redesigning the heat shields and the solar panels and the trusses and the electronics and arrrgghhhhhhhhhh............................
I wonder if they will get more resources (money, people, test facility access) to complete things a year faster? Ah sorry, what was i thinking, management dont give additional resources. They only make "savings"...
(sorry - been in too many projects where schedules get changed without warning, and no compensation of resources ever occurs).
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Thursday 25th May 2017 12:18 GMT Brewster's Angle Grinder
@iglethal
I had the same thought. But a chunk of that year is probably allocated to trying to get the mass down, trying to make it work on the available power, trying to make it fit into the space available, and testing this fragile design. So maybe even the design team will thank you for lifting all those restrictions.
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Monday 29th May 2017 12:05 GMT DropBear
Re: Shiniest?
Should we perhaps redefine every other colour as "high-temperature black"? Except pink, of course, which isn't a real colour, therefore it's still a real colour and not "hot black". Dang it, where are all the graphic artist friends I don't have when you need them, to annoy them by claiming all they know how to work with is a variety of shades of black...
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