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Mercury Probe Delayed by Ten Weeks, and Two Years
Gogo Dodo writes "Spaceflight Now reports that NASA's MESSENGER probe launch has been delayed by 10 weeks. Unfortunately, this means MESSENGER will not arrive at Mercury until 2011, a two year delay."
Remember, kiddies: Earth isn't the only planet that orbits the Sun!
Goo goo g'joob.
Its ironic that a mission to the fleet-footed god of messages should take so long. I guess its revenge by those ancient Roman gods.
I'm just glad that the mission was not scrubbed.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'm kinda concerned about the budget hit, though. Maintaining an engineering infrastructure on the ground for an additional two years, even one in "standby," is going to be costly. Sure, they can loan out personell to other projects during the interim, but you're going to see two more years of attrition and then retraining costs to catch up. A boom or bust in the tech cycle will simply agravate the situation (boom=more people leaving, bust=fewer new engineers to fill vacated slots).
The delay is probably acceptable, but let's hope the added budget doesn't hurt another probe.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Mercury goes around the sun in 87 days. Assuming that the orbits are circles (they're pretty close) it should never be more than 86 days for the planet to be in an optimal position to launch a probe. So, why would it be off by two years? What am I missing here?
...Gates has conquered Earth and now has his sights set on another planet?! Oh, wait...
MeSSEnGeR or NOAA or ECHO or SOHO (which stands for many things, including the solar observatory).
http://www.acronymfinder.com/
To what extent does the "warping" of space near an object as massive as the sun affect this little spacecraft's orbital calculations? I know (but don't fully understand) that there are relativistic effects on Mercury's orbit that aren't described by pure Newtonian physics.
To what extent do the mission planners have to account for this effect? Can they even know for sure until they see what happens as they pass by Mercury those three times before orbital insertion? Or will the effect be negligible compared to the solar wind and other "normal" forces? The link above notes that Newton is only off by 43 arcseconds out of 5600, but it seems like even 0.77% could add up pretty quick.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
...which does seem pretty camel-through-eye-of-needle at ranges of tens of millions of km. Venus gets two flybys @3000km and 300km.
This is needed because Earth orbit is about 3x as energetic as Mercury orbit. Messenger needs to dump the other 2/3 of its momentum, and slingshot flybys are far and away the cheapest method for that. This requires eveything to be lined up just so.
It's a pity, really, because I suspect Mercury of harbouring numerous hermeological surprises (as surprising as Valles Marineris on Mars, a 3000km gouge up to 10km deep which was not formed by water, wind or tectonics), and a bugger-the-cost lets-burn-many-tonnes-of-propellant (much to meet Mercury, a little more to kick the probe into orbit around it) approach would get a probe there in only a few months.
We don't have many pictures of it yet, and the aforementioned surprises should stimulate significant scientific progress, most likely by killing off a large percentage of current solar system formation theories.
At least there will still be a probe. With Dubya at the reins, it could have been worse.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There is another worry though - the extra two years in space also significantly increases the risk of the probe or its instruments being damaged by solar flares (as happened to Mars Odyssey, radiation, temperature changes and debris.
The best thing about this name is that if NASA ever develop teleportation technology, they can integrate it into the next version and call it "Instant MESSENGER."
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!