NEAR-Shoemaker to 'Smack Into' Eros

streampipe writes "NASA's asteroid-orbiting NEAR-Shoemaker satellite has essentially completed it's mission, and scientists will attempt to land the craft onto Eros on February 12th in an attempt to squeeze some 'bonus science' out of the orbiter...story at CNN." NASA's pretty good at smacking probes into other objects - this target is a little smaller than, say, Mars, but I predict a solid hit. :)

Eros to Earth!

[Hairy_Potter]

This means war!

Re:SI or English

[tesserae]

NASA is the only aerospace group in this country which uses metric; everyone else uses American units, just as they always have.

If the aerospace industry went metric, everyone would have problems; now, NASA is the only one -- and then only if they don't bother to check...

---

Landing is only a very slight possibility

[Nos.]

Our primary purpose is not to land. Our primary purpose is to get to a very low altitude to take high resolution pictures

They just want to get very close to the asteroid and send back as many pictures of the asteroid before it crashes. There's a 1% chance of it surviving the landing, even though that's what the article summary seems to say they're planning on doing.

As a NIST engineer once said...

[SuperJ]

...if it doesn't fall apart after taking the last data point, you've overengineered it.

Re:Eros to Earth!

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

Only if they steal the Aludium Q35 Exploding Space Modulator...

"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."

SI or English

[Locus27]

I wonder if they remembered to have some math monkey convert from meters to feet. oops.

Smack in a microgravity environment?

[mancuskc]

Surely it's not going to hit very quickly? What's the G of this lump of rock? Tiny, probably.

It'll be more of a clunk....

Weight !== Mass

[tesserae]

The gravitational attraction of Eros is small -- small enough that orbital velocity of NEAR Shoemaker is only a few miles per hour, like a brisk walking pace.

The problem is this: the spacecraft isn't going terribly fast, but it still has all its momentum... so when it hits, it's likely to tumble, shearing off solar collectors and anything else that protrudes. Even if it hits at just the right angle, it can't just slide to a stop -- there's not enough gravity for that (escape velocity is so low you could easily throw a rock into solar orbit); instead, it would take lots of bounces, hitting at new angles each time and tearing more stuff up.

I'm hoping it just "plonks" in, but I'm not counting on anything.

---