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2 Mars Missions Set For Arrival, Both Prepare for Orbital Maneuvers
As reported by the BBC, NASA's Maven Mars orbiter has nearly reached the red planet, and will undergo a 33-minute rocket burn to slow its course.
Monday's big manoeuvre on Maven's engines will place the satellite in a high, elliptical, 35-hour orbit around the planet. Confirmation of capture should be received on Earth shortly after 0220 GMT (2220 EDT Sunday; 0320 BST). "We should have a preliminary answer within just a few minutes after the end of the burn," said [principal investigator professor Bruce] Jakosky. In the coming weeks, engineers will then work to bring Maven into a regular 4.5-hour, operational orbit that takes the probe as close as 150km to Mars but also sends it out to 6,200km.
India's first mission to Mars faces a critical test as it does a similar maneuver -- firing of a rocket to slow its travel as it approaches Mars orbit.
What are some of the best astronomy-specific news sites? I know that each individual agency has their own news sites, but would like to find a site that gathers everything in one place.
For somw reason, it wouldn't surprise me if these two craft collided, despite being the only two approaching the entire planet. It just seems that any time a government spends a lot of money to do anything, it normally ends with a fail worthy of Monty Python .
There's a lot of exciting stuff happening right now. The Dawn mission is on its way to get a close look at Ceres in April next year. Rosetta is sending a lander onto a comet (which is about to do the exciting thing for comets - i.e. go near the sun). New Horizons is going to fly past Pluto next July. There are two rovers exploring Mars. Not to mention Cassini, Messenger, etc. You can be negative if you like, but I think these missions are pretty amazing.
I'm having trouble remembering the last time two gov't funded space exploration vehicles collided. Oh wait, you were just trying to appear clever but collided with fail.
You are an idiot...of course, you did post AC. If the moon landings were false, the USSR, our main adversary at the time, would have busted us. How would you spoof radio signals from the moon, or in transit ? You can't. First tier nations, as well as motivated radio amateurs, could receive it all... Go find a site to climate deny.
While it could happen (technically almost anything can happen in an infinite universe), it is far more likely that the Swedish Women's Volleyball team will burst into your room in the next five seconds and give you death by snu-snu.
You have no idea about how big the vastness of space is. The chance of them colliding is like the chance of two bullets being fired in a high arc across New York city, and them colliding. Sure that chance happens once per orbit, but its simply not going to happen especially as they both will eventually establish stable orbits that simply will never cross.
The burn was successful and Maven is in orbit. It looks like the engines were under-performing in some way though and they will have to tweak the orbit some as a result.
Better known as 318230.
After a 10-month journey through deep space, NASA's MAVEN probe arrived in Mars orbit late Sunday (Sept. 21), on a mission to help scientists figure out why the Red Planet changed from a relatively warm and wet place in the ancient past to the cold, arid world it is today.
MAVEN, whose name is short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, fired its engines in a crucial 30-minute braking burn Sunday night, slowing down enough to be captured by the planet's gravity around 10:24 p.m. EDT (0224 GMT Monday, Sept. 22).
http://www.space.com/27217-nas...
For those who don't quite understand that "worthy of Monty Python " implies something ridiculous, so improbable as to be almost beyond imagination, let mw get serious for a moment.
They will not collide because the only time they will be "near" each other they'll be at very different altitudes from the Martian surface. One will be 10,000 meters above the surface while the other is 33,000 feet above. Veteran scientists who worked on the Mars climate orbiter have confirmed this is plenty of separation between the two.
What, this one? An autonomous rendezvous test satellite that bashed into the derelict satellite it was practising with?
I mean, the whole point of that mission was to get close, tho not quite that close.
It just seems that any time a government spends a lot of money to do anything, it normally ends with a fail worthy of Monty Python
Lets be fair here, the last thing they did on Mars was place a 1 ton nuclear powered tank on the surface using a rocket powered crane, so they've obviously come along way since that unfortunate units mixup...
The white zone is for loading and unloading only...there is no stopping in the red zone.