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One Last mission For Deep Space 1
Vertigo01 writes: "Looks like NASA has found a fitting end for Deep Space 1, they're going to fly her THROUGH the coma of a comet to try and take some pictures of the comet's core ... the kicker is that they're doing it with barely any fuel left, and a kludged-together science-camera to replace the toasted navigation system ... kind of a fitting end for her IMO."
For goodness sake, will people stop posting this trolling story? As has been said before this is misleading.
For the first few missions, the Soviets did use pencils. Then the Soviets went to Fisher (the American company that made the pens) and bought several cases. The reason is that pencils produce a lot of graphite dust. When you are locked in a room the size of a telephone booth for a week, you don't want graphite dust floating around, getting into your lungs, eyes and your equipment.
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First of all, the small mass of the satellite could only slightly alter the orbit of the comet. There is no way that it could impart enough energy to take the comet out of solar orbit and send it towards a distant star.
Secondly, since comets are made of "dirty ice", imparting enough energy to take the comet out of solar orbit via a single impact would almost certainly vaporize the comet rather than moving it.
Thirdly, even if you could nudge a comet out of solar orbit, since the average speed of a comet is on the order of 1/6000 the speed of light or less (about 100,000 mph), it would take about 25,000 years for the comet to get to the nearest star (Alpha Centauri A), let alone "distant stars".
So no, it wouldn't be a cool way to contact alien civilizations.
The problem NASA had with the Metric vs Imerial calculations was due to rounding errors in the conversion equations (ie: only going out x amount of decimals points; where x wasn't large enough). The error introduced by the lack of precision wasn't due to a single conversion but due to multiple back and forth conversions (probably in the order more than a hundred). It was not a single incident of "oops, I meant five meters, not five feet."
This doesn't justify it, but I don't think a lot of people actually know what the real problem was. It was a precision error, not a Metric vs Imperial error.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
This mission is somewhat similar to that of the Giotto probe in 1986. Here is the link to the ESA site with more information about Giotto. But where Giotto was a dedicated mission, designed to take pictures and collect data of a comet core, the DS1 comet mission is "just" a great bonus mission.
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