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Comet Probes Given New Duties
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Jul 05, 2007 09:34 PM
from the back-again-for-a-second-season dept.
from the back-again-for-a-second-season dept.
iamlucky13 writes "In January of 2004, the NASA's Stardust mission made a flyby of comet Wild-2, taking images and collecting samples from its tail that have since been returned to earth in a detachable capsule. On July 4, 2005, Deep Impact smashed a 350 kg projectile traveling 37,000 km/h into comet Tempel 1 as part of its studies of that object. With both craft in good shape at the end of their missions, NASA has been considering additional tasks for the probes. These plans have now been confirmed with a variety of tasks costing an estimated 15% what a new mission would. Among the new duties will be a revisit of Tempel 1, a flyby of comet Boethin, and transit studies of known extra-solar planets."
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Cometary Fireworks Go Off Without Hitch 374 comments
PingXao writes "The JPL Deep Impact mission has successfully slammed a sattelite into Tempel 1 at 23,000 mph. (37,000 kph). The autonomous navigation system was primed for up to 3 course corrections in the final 2 hours of flight but only had to execute two of them. The second was so small - expending less than a pound of propellant - that impact would have occurred without it. Initially thought to be shaped like a pickle, it came to resemble more of a banana shape as comet Tempel I drew closer. Impact was estimated to have released 19 Gigajoules of energy, or the equivalent of 4.5 tons of TNT."
[+]
NASA Stardust Returns to Earth 119 comments
quadsoft writes "The Globe and Mail reports "Dugway Proving Ground, Utah -- A space capsule ferrying the first comet dust samples to Earth parachuted onto a remote stretch of desert before dawn Sunday, drawing cheers from elated scientists.
The touchdown capped a seven-year journey by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which zipped past a comet in 2004 to capture minute dust particles and store them in the capsule.""
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Deep Impact Mission May Be Extended 50 comments
SeaDour writes "The famous Deep Impact mission, which in 2005 launched a projectile in the path of comet Tempel 1, may be extended by NASA. The proposal is to slingshot the probe around the Earth as it passes by at the end of this year, putting it on a trajectory to reach comet Boethin in December 2008. Scientists want to see if the strange composition and behavior of Tempel 1 is more common than they had previously assumed. (The probe only had one projectile though, so we will not see another brilliant man-made explosion on this comet.) Additionally, while the probe is en route to the comet, researchers will point its on-board telescope at known exosolar planets to determine the compositions of their atmospheres."
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Scientists Offer 'Overwhelming' Evidence Terran Life Began in Space 556 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Using data from recent comet-probing space missions, British scientists are reporting today that the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet are one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against. That is, we're not originally from around here. Radiation in comets could keep water in liquid form for millions of years, they say, which along with the clay and organic molecules found on-board would provide an ideal incubator. 'Professor Wickramasinghe said: "The findings of the comet missions, which surprised many, strengthen the argument for panspermia. We now have a mechanism for how it could have happened. All the necessary elements - clay, organic molecules and water - are there. The longer time scale and the greater mass of comets make it overwhelmingly more likely that life began in space than on earth."'" jamie points out that the author of this paper has many 'fringe' theories. Your mileage may vary.
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good (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:good (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Precisely. NASA's budget is $16.8 Billion (US) and dropping relatively to the strength of the dollar. [wikipedia.org]
Though it seems like a lot of money, compare to ANY other governmental program (consider Welfare at 14% of the US GDP [wikipedia.org] means that almost 2 trillion dollars are spent YEARLY on welfare alone! Now also keep in mind this includes corporate welfare...)
My point being, is that given the scientific, bureaucratic, safety, social, political and
Re:good (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people only follow space exploration at the soundbite level (evening news or whatnot). Hearing that yet another vehicle continues to operate beyond its life expectancy is a good way to create a positive perception of NASA in the general public.
Regards.
Parent
Re:good (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:good (Score:4, Insightful)
Translated to what we have at NASA or even the DOD today, you have an underpromising risk adverse group of people that still wind up burning through money unnecessarily because they spend it all trying to figure out how to do it all within a precise window. If you look at the sorts of radical research that came about between the 1950s and 1960s, versus what we have today, and I think you'd have to conclude that NASA has utterly lost its nerve. Sometimes you just have to put a guy up on top of a missile to see if it won't blow up. NASA would never do that today, and that is why we have not yet gone back to the moon or to mars.
It's that, they are all a bunch of pussies now, as are most American engineers.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:good (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't really do that - as you don't know what kind of shape the probe will be in at the end of it's primary mission. That being said, it's been NASA's tacit policy for years to run their probes until they drop if at all possible.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I think nasa should make it standard mission procedure to plan several possible missions for each probe they send. Its unfortunate that there isn't more interest in space travel- but they may be able to spark more interest with more ambitious missions.
Anything funded by NASA has both a downscope and an upscope -- and usually several of them. As a matter of fact, during the development of a large project, it is quite normal that the total amount of available money goes up or down by a significant margin. So every part and piece is always planned on the the basis of "what do we want to do here, what could we do with 20% less money, what would be possible if we could get 20% more mass, power, funds...".
There's no subsystem that is just planned as one th
This is awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I am one of a very small minority on slashdot who gets excited about this stuff...
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is awesome (Score:5, Informative)
Precedent? Hardly. Voyager 2 was originally only planned to flyby only Jupiter and Saturn. The engineers worked without permission from NASA management to build the spacecraft to be able to do a successful flyby of Uranus and Neptune (the probes had an official specification of their lifetimes of something on the order of 3 years or so). Eventually they were able to convince the management that if Voyager 1 was operating safely in space and was looking like it was going to be able to get a good look at Titan then Voyager 2 could reprogram its trajectory so that it could do the flybys of Uranus and Neptune. It was not possible for the Voyager probes to do the specified flyby of Titan and also visit Uranus and Neptune. If Voyager 1 would have blown up or had a problem in space then Voyager 2 would have done the flyby of Titan.
Though to be honest, I'm not even sure if this mission set the original precedent of mission extensions to check out other stuff.
Parent
Re:Define "good science" (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
For 15% of 200 million dollars, you can do a heck of a lot on the ground. That will fund.
Eight hours in Iraq.
or six hours of M$.
---
Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
We have gained plenty of knowledge from space exploration. In many people's books, that's enough to make it worthwhile, but we also get to apply that knowledge on the ground.
Money "spent" on space (Score:2)
Exactly, and many critics fail to realize that most of the money "spent" on space is actually being spent here on the ground - to pay engineer salaries, etc. The engineers can then provide education and health care for their family, etc. Sure, the engineers would probably have jobs anyways, but what would those jobs be? Building weapons? (I'm not saying they'd all be doing that, but most engineers would be in a similar field, at least, to their rocket/space/robotic technologies.)
Re: (Score:2)
Summary: Short-term stuff sometimes looks more rewarding than long-term stuff.
Three cheers for NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
Those little rovers are STILL going. There were supposed to last about 3 months and they are still plugging along. And one with a limp - so valiant! And as for the Voyagers, I gulp. SO cool.
Yes, they have some horrible bureaucratic problems. Yes, they have some sever political challenges. But credit where credit is due.
Well done chaps.
Re:Three cheers for NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
Here we are reading about expanded missions, the potential for more data than initially thought, the ability to retask a probe on another planet, or out in space, for a uses that no one even thought of when it was launched years before. And we are getting real and useful information from these missions. All without risking a single life, and at fractions of the cost of manned missions.
I realize that i sound like a broken record on this topic, but really, is there anyone left who doesn't think that one of the biggest roadblocks in the way of our learning about other planets and our solar system is the push for manned space exploration? We are putting people in a tin fort at the edge of our atmosphere, and celebrating it as an accomplishment? What is that going to get us at the moment? Can anyone really justify it as fiscally sound, without having to resort to either 1) technology we don't have yet like a space ship to get us to mars, 2) study of the effects of low gravity on humans (hint, it's bad, we know that), 3) or as a staging area for mars? (it won't be)
I am not saying we should never think about going out into space, but now is not the time. Lets work on designing the ships that will take us there, and figuring out how we are going to do it first. Most of that can be done in labs and in virtual reality, only towards the end of the design cycle will we have to go back out there, and i can almost guarantee you we will not need to stop off at the ISS.
Please write your congress people about the need to fund NASA, and the need to not sacrifice good unmanned missions in the face of wasteful and dangerous manned missions.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Yup. On the others all that neck hair kept getting in the way.
Re:Three cheers for NASA (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Impressive Camera (Score:3, Interesting)
Definitely a great effort, its hard not to love those guys out in Pasadena.
Re:Impressive Camera (Score:5, Informative)
I guess the camera has a high dynamic range but not particularly strong light collecting capabilities, which makes it ideal for doing this with bright, nearby stars, especially with all the assets already on orbit, where all that needs to be done is point and click. Pretty cool trick.
Parent
Re: (Score:1)
"Begun, the clone war has!" -Yoda
Re: (Score:2)