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Details of Chinese Spacecraft's Asteroid Encounter
the_newsbeagle writes "Chinese aerospace engineers have revealed, for the first time, details about their Chang'e-2 spacecraft's encounter with the asteroid Toutatis last month. They have plenty to boast: The asteroid flyby wasn't part of the original flight plan, but engineers adapted the mission and navigated the satellite through deep space (PDF). Exactly how close Chang'e-2 came to Toutatis is still unclear. The article states that the first reports 'placed the flyby range at 3.2 km, which was astonishingly—even recklessly—tight. Passing within a few kilometers of an asteroid only 2 to 3 km in diameter at a speed of 10,730 meters per second could be described as either superb shooting or a near disaster.' If the Chinese spacecraft did pass that near, it could provide a "scientific bonanza" with data about the asteroid's mass and composition."
Have you seen some of the missions NASA has undertaken?
Yes, and even when they fail or kill people, they aren't usually described as "reckless" or "disaster" (even if near). If someone died, it was a tragedy, but not a disaster. At least in mainstream media. But this, a well-executed fly-by, is a reckless near-disaster. It wasn't the mission that was the complaint, but the coverage of it. It was described in a negative manner. Why?
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But was the camera Sorny, Cannonn, or Nycon?
Learn to love Alaska
Passing within a few kilometers of an asteroid only 2 to 3 km in diameter at a speed of 10,730 meters per second could be described as either superb shooting or a near disaster.
I'm not often a "Yay, China!" kind of guy, but I do admit that's pretty cool; ballsy even. I'm happy for the engineers who stuck their necks out to try it. Pretty neat!
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Then they conducted a reckless ASAT test at relatively high LEO altitudes and nearly doubled the number of trackable debris at that altitude [see Johnson Space Center's Orbital Debris Quarterly Newsletter for the chart]. At that altitude, the pieces of their defunct weather satellite will remain a hazard for many decades. That got them uninvited.
China needs to decide whether the PLA is running the show or not, and decide whether they want to be a responsible space-faring nation... or not.
Holy (bleep), did you see the landing sequence of Curiosity? -- that's dancing near the fire! The reason it worked is because of all of those "bureaucratic tests", and there is now a laboratory on Mars which no other nation or agency could have put there. Kudos to the Chinese for the Chang'e-2 mission, but NASA is still so far ahead of anyone else in robot exploration of the solar system, measured by current, operating, successful missions (Cassini, Messenger, Curiosity, New Horizons, etc, etc), that there is really no comparison.