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Chinese Moon Probe Flies By Asteroid Toutatis
hackingbear writes "Chinese moon probe Chang'e-2 made a flyby of the near-earth asteroid Toutatis on December 13 at 16:30:09 Beijing Time (08:30:09 GMT), the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) announced today. The flyby was the first time an unmanned spacecraft launched from Earth has taken such a close viewing of the asteroid, named after a Celtic god, making China the fourth country after the U.S., the EU and Japan to be able to examine an asteroid by spacecraft. Chang'e-2 came as close as 3.2 km from Toutatis, which is about 7 million km away from the Earth, and took pictures of the asteroid at a relative velocity of 10.73 km per second, the SASTIND said in a statement. Chang'e-2, originally designated as the backup of Chang'e-1, left its lunar orbit for an extended mission to the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian point on June 9, 2011, after finishing its lunar objectives, and then again began its mission to Toutatis this year. 'The success of the extended missions also embodies that China now possesses spacecraft capable of interplanetary flight,' said Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's lunar probe program."
http://english.cri.cn/6909/2012/12/15/53s738568.htm
Try clicking the buttons below the cartoon.
It will give it the little gravitational push it needs to crash on Earth in 2145 or so. Thank you China.
Le ciel va nous tomber sur la tête!
[whistles] Wow, how much fuel did they put in that thing? It spent around 8 months in lunar orbit, which usually eats up a bit of fuel right there, even without the several orbital changes they did while there. And then it leaves lunar orbit on its way to the Earth-Sun L2 point? I realize that once you get out of LEO the amount of fuel required to get anywhere (at least slowly) goes down exponentially but they must have packed quite a bit of fuel into that thing (I believe it is roughly the size of a walk in closet)
If you compare this image with the Goldstone image of Toutatis by Earth-based radar - see Figure 1 in Hudson et al - you can see that the Earth radar does OK, but actually going there is better. Toutatis's rotation period is 176 hours, so we won't get to see the other side in the flyby.
Note that there are a few craters, but not many (asteroid Itokawa has no craters in Hayabusa images), so as usual something is resurfacing the surface.
If you follow the link and go three pictures forward (avoiding the ads that appear in the bottom-right corner), then you can see a diagram of the Chang'e 2's flight path, including the part where it orbits the L2 Langrangian. I think in an American publication they'd not want to include that diagram because they'd get too many letters asking 'what the ****' it was.
SpaceX is not where the action is happening. If you think the only private spaceflight is SpaceX, you simply don't know what is going on.
Check out Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, Scaled Composites, Bigelow Aerospace, Blur Origin, and XCor (just to name a few... I know I'm missing a bunch). Even with SpaceX their flight manifest has a majority of the flights booked for commercial projects that have nothing to do with the federal government.
I guess the saying goes that if it is raining money, you haul out the buckets and grab what you can, so doing business with the government is a prudent thing if they are throwing money about. None the less it isn't even the government that is the concern.
I'd also have you listen in on hearings with the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. There are a number of members of congress that are incredibly hostile to commercial spaceflight and are openly trying to stop commercial enterprises from happening at all in space or are incredulous that commercial activities could even happen at all. Quite literally the owners of these private enterprises are telling the government to get out of their way and not mess with their businesses.