Asteroid Mission Competition Announces Winner 60
Riding with Robots writes "The Planetary Society invited participants to compete for $50,000 in prizes by designing a mission to rendezvous with and 'tag' a potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid. The asteroid Apophis was used as the target for the mission design because it will come closer to Earth in 2029 than the orbit of geostationary satellites. The winning mission design is called Foresight, and calls for the use of off-the-shelf parts to undercut the price of other proposals. Here's a PDF of the winning proposal."
It could be worse (Score:5, Funny)
It could be interactive (Score:2, Funny)
It could be quite an interactive project, albeit not in the way intended.
Perhaps it is a typo or the authors meant to avoid confusing the PHBs with 'technical' jargon like SSH, SFTP, and HTTPS. Page 28 of the document clearly says that FTP and Telnet are used. FTP will be used for data transfer to and from the satellite and that telnet is involve in the command and control.
Looks like Lunar Lander [geody.com] needs to add an option for NEO Asteroid, so that the first one to get in doesn't use all the fuel on t
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Perhaps it is a typo or the authors meant to avoid confusing the PHBs with 'technical' jargon like SSH, SFTP, and HTTPS
I know a few of the guys that wrote this, and I'm pretty sure they aren't intending simple, easy-to-hack communications protocols. They're aerospace and mechanical engineers, not IT or network types--but I'm quite sure they know such systems need to be secure. Telnet and FTP are more recognizable to the layperson (and PHBs, and beancounters), and I guess an argument could be made that SSH and SFTP are kind of like subsets of those, in a way. Overall, they probably went with the "simple" versions to emph
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Or, as Burns would have it:
``In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.''
Interesting name... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting name... (Score:5, Informative)
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But dun'worry. For those big ones, Carter will deal with them. Big ones get her horny.
Let the wannabe's take care of those petty ones that the most they can do is bring Earth into a nuclear winter after destroying some major city. Paris. In the movies it's allways Paris.
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--
I think that over twenty years the extra weight of that little tag is going to knock it off it's current course and make it hit Earth. I ask that all of you repeat this, make youtube videos about it and proclaim repeatedly that we're all going to die.
Thank you.
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Re:Interesting name... (Score:5, Informative)
It's obvious what we need to do... (Score:1)
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Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
So yes, building this with available components and not using custom-designed circuit boards and parts could significantly save money.
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Sometimes it seems to me like the "shelf" is very small and new for a lot of "COTS" components... as in the vendor may have never actually sold or even built one, but they figure somebody might want it, so they say they have it, and then they somehow manage to have no units available for evaluation, and the lead time for getting the component is several months. I figure this is because almost all govt acquisition guidelines call for the use of "COTS" components.
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Software issues can cripple this sort of project, but nowhere near as much as feature creep could.
Why aren't governments doing this (Score:4, Insightful)
Great, it's done... (Score:2, Funny)
Another Asteriod Mission (Score:5, Interesting)
Because an easy source of raw materials in orbit would certainly make a lot of things a *lot* more interesting, considering the price of lifting such materials to orbit.
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unfortunately I did, for the love of god DO NOT WATCH THAT MOVIE! IT BURNSSSSSSS!
Re:Another Asteroid Mission (Score:2)
Re:Another Asteriod Mission (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Another Asteriod Mission (Score:4, Funny)
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downside to another moon (Score:4, Funny)
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Just how large a body do think the author was writing about?
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Mass of Luna: 7.3477 × 10^22 kg
Mass of Apophis: 2.6 × 10^10 kg
Say we parked Apophis in geosynchronous orbit (42 164 000 m above the center of the Earth). That's about a hundred times closer than the average distance of Luna from the same point (384 400 000 m). However, Apophis is a little more than 10^12 times less massive than the moon, and the smaller mass matters a lot more than the smaller radius.
(Yes, I did look up the gravitational equation. Yes, I did actually run the numbers. This being Slashdot, yes, I'm comfortable with admitting that.)
You don't even need to look up the gravitational equation in that case. If you put it in geosynchronous orbit any tidal effect is going to be static, even if the mass is large.
The gravitational equation isn't quite the right one to use. "Tidal forces" are the radial derivative of the gravitational force, so in effect tidal forces are a 1/r^3 force rather than a 1/r^2 force. So the tidal force per unit mass is about 760 times larger at geosynch than at lunar orbit, but since the mass is 3x10^12 times l
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Re:Another Asteriod Mission (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe this to be prohibitive, not because of guiding and asteroid would be impossible, but because for a earth orbit you'd have to slow it down a lot.
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Re:Another Asteriod Mission (Score:4, Funny)
That or I've been watching way too much Anime.
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Because an easy source of raw materials in orbit would certainly make a lot of things a *lot* more interesting, considering the price of lifting such materials to orbit
1)The nuclear devices would cause EM pulses if they were too close to the earth
2)To be large enough to be useful, it would influence tides (and the moon's orbit) ever so slightly- enough to present significant problems in the long haul. It would also influence the orbit of everything *else* orbiting the earth.
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Large enough to be useful? Let's see. We've put how many millions of tons in Earth orbit since the dawn of the Space Age? 0.01? Less than that?
So, let's imagine the potential value of a 300m diameter ball of nickel-iron in Earth orbit. Hmm, calculator says that that's 100
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Without adding some kind of thruster, we only know the position during the 2029 close approach to within, a few thousand kilometers (at which point it can't hit the Earth within its 3-sigma probability, but may hit a keyhole), and the perturbation caused by the Earth at that point makes it
unlucky for some... (Score:2)
By "tag" in this context do we perchance mean "nuke into oblivion"... just asking...
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I have an even better way to get to the asteroid (Score:2)
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Mayan Calendar... almost (Score:1, Funny)
But Google came to the rescue and the Mayan calendar actually ends on 2012... oh well.
I guess I have to find another coincedental date of importance.... Did Nostradomus predict something for 2029?
Can we capture it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Executive Summary (Score:2, Informative)
The Foresight spacecraft is a concept design for a radio tagging mission to Near Earth
Asteroid (NEO) Apophis. The spacecraft is designed to be a low-cost, low-risk, minimal
science mission in order to achieve the goal of obtaining accurate tracking information for
Apophis. The baseline spacecraft mission includes a launch from Wallops Island, Virginia on
an Orbital Sciences Corporation Minotaur IV launch vehicle. Five launch windows have
been identified spanning the yea
OTC (Score:2)
great (Score:1)
T3
Are Bruce, Clint and Robert available? (Score:1)
Cool! A Minnie Driver/Anne Hathaway love scene! (Score:1)