View Full Version : [Space] NASA - New Horizons: Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission
Sito ufficiale della missione: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/
Sito della missione della John Hopkins University: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/index.php
Missione
Primary Launch Window:
January 17 - February 14, 2006
Launch Vehicle:
Atlas V 551 first stage; Centaur second stage; STAR 48B solid rocket third stage
Location:
Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida
Trajectory:
• To Pluto via Jupiter Gravity Assist (first 17 days of window)
• Direct to Pluto (last 12 days of window)
Secondary Launch Window:
February 2-15, 2007 ; puts New Horizons on a direct-to-Pluto trajectory with arrival in 2019-2020, depending on exact launch date.
The Voyage
Early Cruise: Assuming liftoff during the primary launch window in January 2006, the first 13 months include spacecraft and instrument checkouts, instrument calibrations, trajectory correction maneuvers, and rehearsals for the Jupiter encounter.
Jupiter Encounter: Closest approach scheduled to occur between Feb. 25- March 2, 2007. Moving about 47,000 miles per hour (about 21 kilometers per second), New Horizons would fly 3 to 4 times closer to Jupiter than the Cassini spacecraft, coming within 31.7-32.4 Jupiter radii of the large planet.
Interplanetary Cruise: activities during the approximately 8-year cruise to Pluto include annual spacecraft and instrument checkouts, trajectory corrections, instrument calibrations and Pluto encounter rehearsals.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/images/trajectoryImage.jpg
Pluto-Charon Encounter
Arrival depends on launch date:
- Arrival via Jupiter: 2015-2017; direct to Pluto: 2018-2020
- At the earliest, current 1st graders will see New Horizons arrive at Pluto during the summer before 12th grade!
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/images/pluto_encounter2.jpg
Into the Kuiper Belt
Plans for an extended mission include one to two encounters of Kuiper Belt Objects, ranging from about 25 to 55 miles (40 to 90 kilometers) in diameter. New Horizons would acquire the same data it collected at Pluto-Charon - where applicable - and follow a timeline similar to the Pluto-Charon encounter:
- Closest Approach - 4 weeks: object observations
- Closest Approach + 2 weeks: post-encounter studies
- Closest Approach + 2 months: all data returned to Earth
New Horizons: First Mission to the Last Planet
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: January 14, 2006
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. (CBS) - Imagine the sun the size of a quarter - one inch across - on the goal line of the Rose Bowl.
The Earth, just 0.009 inches across, would be positioned around the three-yard line. Mighty Jupiter, just one tenth of an inch across, would be "orbiting" inside the red zone at the 15-and-a-half yard line and ringed Saturn would be just inside the 30. The outer gas giants, Uranus and Neptune, would be orbiting on the opponent's side of the field, 57 and 90 yards from the sun.
And what of frigid Pluto, circling the sun in a lopsided orbit at an average distance of 3.7 billion miles? The icy dwarf would be an invisible speck one thousandth-of-an-inch across 18 yards beyond the opponent's goal line. At that scale, light would move at two-tenths of an inch per second and it would take radio signals more than five hours, on average, to cross the field and reach the ninth planet. The nearest star would be some 460 miles from Pasadena.*
Now imagine sending a spacecraft from Earth, on the three-yard line, to Pluto more than 100 yards away. That's exactly what NASA plans to do Jan. 17 when it launches the nuclear-powered New Horizons probe on a $700 million mission to the only one of the solar system's nine traditional planets that has never been visited.
Given the mind-boggling distances involved, NASA is launching the small, 1,054-pound New Horizons probe atop one of the most powerful unmanned rockets in the U.S. inventory, a 20-story-tall, 1.2-million-pound Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 equipped with five strap-on boosters. Departing Earth at a record 36,000 mph, the spacecraft will cross the moon's orbit just nine hours after liftoff. It will cross the orbit of Mars, race through the asteroid belt and get to Jupiter in just 13 months for a velocity boosting gravity assist flyby that also will give the science team an opportunity to thoroughly test the probe's half-dozen instruments.
Even though its velocity will be 100 times faster than a jetliner throughout its long voyage, it will still take New Horizons, the fastest thing ever built by the people of planet Earth, more than eight additional years to reach Pluto and its moon Charon. Kids in the first grade today will be in high school, dating and learning to drive by the time the spacecraft reaches its target. Their parents will have voted in two presidential elections and Vince Young, the University of Texas quarterback who starred in this year's Rose Bowl game, will be facing the twilight of his professional football career.
"This is, in a very real sense, the capstone of the initial reconnaissance of the planets that the United States has led for the world since the 1960s," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
"We're going farther to reach our target and we're travelling faster than any spacecraft ever has. This is a little bit about leadership, a little bit about re-writing the textbooks about the outer planets. But I also want to point out it's also about inspiring the next generation of scientists and explorers, who we hope will take us to even greater heights."
Equipped with powerful cameras to map the sunlit side of the planet, spectrometers to characterize its space environment, the planet's tenuous atmosphere and surface composition and a student-built dust collector, New Horizons will race past Pluto in July 2015, streaking within 5,500 miles of the surface at a velocity of more than 31,000 mph.
After rapid-fire observations of Pluto, Charon and at least two other recently discovered moons, New Horizons will sail on into the Kuiper Belt, a vast realm of icy dwarf worlds that serves as a reservoir of short-period comets and home to at least one, and presumably more, planets larger than Pluto, the zone's most famous member.
If all goes well, New Horizons, built by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, will fly past at least one other Kuiper Belt world before the mission's funding runs out. After that, the spacecraft will continue on into interstellar space, joining NASA's twin Voyagers and Pioneers as the fifth human artifact to depart the solar system.
"New Horizons is the first mission to the last planet," said project scientist Hal Weaver. "It's going to perform a detailed reconnaissance of Pluto and its companion, Charon. We're actually not going to stop there. We're going to continue to fly past Pluto deep into the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons is going to be going where no other mission has ever been, so it truly is a mission of exploration and discovery.
"Why are we doing this? Science is the driver. Science is the reason new Horizons is making this journey to the outskirts of the solar system. We think the study of Pluto, Charon and the Kuiper Belt objects are key to understanding the origin and evolution of the solar system."
It is remarkable to remember that astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 and that in a single generation - 76 years - technology has progressed from propeller-driven aircraft and steamships to spacecraft capable of reaching that distant world.
"Pluto was discovered in 1930," Weaver said. "In 1978, its moon, Charon, was discovered. It has only been in the past 10 years that we've known about this third zone, a torus-shaped region surrounding the sun that we now call the Kuiper Belt. It's only been in really the last 10 years that we've recognized that Pluto and Charon actually are more similar to these small icy worlds in the Kuiper Belt than they are to the other planets.
"All of those objects - Pluto, Charon and the Kuiper Belt objects - have been kept in a deep freeze on the outskirts of the solar system since the time of its formation 4.6 billion years ago," Weaver said. "And for that reason, it's preserved that original material from which the solar system formed and that's one of the important reasons for going there. It's really the frontier of planetary science, it's a region we have never been before."
With the discovery of other sizeable bodies in the Kuiper Belt, including one even bigger than Pluto, the ninth planet's status has been called into question in recent years. Singer Christine Lavin even wrote a song about the debate called "Planet X."
"St. Christopher is looking down on all this
and he says, 'Pluto, I can relate.
When I was demoted from sainthood
I gotta tell you little buddy,
it didn't feel real great'
and Scorpios look up in dismay
because Pluto rules their sign.
Is now reading their daily Horoscope
just a futile waste of time?"
But to Stern, frozen Pluto will always be a planet.
"We've really gone through a revolution, a paradigm shift in planetary science," he said. "We really just didn't realize the diversity of planetary types in our solar system. Pluto looked like a misfit because it was the only one we saw. And just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. They're large enough to make themselves round by self gravity and they surely pass the test of planethood.
"So it's really quite an opportunity to first, find that you're notions were wrong, it's almost like a Copernican revolution. The misfit becomes the average. ... The opportunity is to go now and have a chance to study this most common type of planetary body in the solar system for the first time."
But the mission is not without risk.
Because the sun is little more than a bright star when seen from Pluto's distance - a quarter beyond the far end zone in the Rose Bowl - a solar power system would require arrays on the order of 1,200 square yards in size to collect enough light, to generate enough electricity, to power the craft's systems and instruments.
Instead, New Horizons relies on a single radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG, which converts the heat produced by the radioactive decay of plutonium 238 dioxide into electricity. At launch, the RTG will produce about 240 watts of power. By the time the craft reaches Pluto, the power output will have dropped to about 200 watts, enough to drive two household light bulbs. But that's enough to keep New Horizons alive and well.
RTGs have no moving parts and are extremely reliable. The compact generators have powered all of NASA's deep space missions, including the Pioneers and Voyagers, the Ulysses sun-study probe, the Galileo Jupiter orbiter and the Cassini spacecraft currently in orbit around Saturn. RTGs also were used on six Apollo moon missions and the two Viking Mars landers.
In all, 25 RTG-powered missions have been launched by the United States. Three of those missions failed. In one case, the RTG burned up in the atmosphere as designed at that time. In another, the RTG was later recovered. And an RTG aboard the ill-fated Apollo 13 lunar lander now rests at the bottom of the Tonga Trench in the Pacific Ocean.
New Horizons is equipped with a single RTG loaded with about 24 pounds of highly toxic plutonium dioxide. RTGs are designed to withstand the sort of forces one could expect during a launch mishap, but NASA's environmental impact statement concludes there is a 1-in-350 chance of a launch mishap in which plutonium could be released into the environment.
Even so, NASA claims no additional cancer deaths could be expected over the next 50 years as a result of any failure that has a reasonable probability of occurring. In some extremely unlikely cases - the rocket's self-destruct system fails after a major malfunction, for example - the agency concludes there is a more significant biological risk. But the odds of a release after such multiple failures, NASA engineers believe, are in the realm of 1-in-1 million or lower.
Kurt Lindstrom, a senior manager at NASA headquarters in Washington, said major U.S. rockets have a 93.8 percent overall success rate. Of the failures, 5.8 percent would not involve the kind of forces necessary to damage an RTG enough to release plutonium into the environment. Of the 0.4 percent of the remaining mishaps, Lindstrom said less than half would result in 0.1 latent cancer deaths. A "latent cancer fatality" in this case is the statistical probability of developing cancer over 50 years.
"So there's a very low probability of having an accident generally or particularly having an accident that has a radiological release for this mission," he said.
But anti-nuclear activists argue the risks, however small, outweigh the scientific payoff. At a small demonstration Jan. 7 just outside the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, about three dozen activists, several with children, urged area residents to protest New Horizons' launch.
"We distrust their reasons for needing to launch plutonium," said Maria Telesca-Whipple of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.
"Their impact statement says a 1-in-300 chance of an accident. I've lived here 22 years and have seen accidents with launches that had no plutonium but which released toxic fumes over Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach where the school children were told to stay inside. ... We think it's all smoke and mirrors and we think that it has a lot more to do with the military applications (of nuclear power in space). ... We really just doubt that the general population is being told the truth about why we're actually doing this."
The activists also challenge the NASA-Department of Energy environmental analysis and argue alternative technologies might permit a Pluto mission without the need for RTGs.
NASA managers say that isn't true and the White House has officially approved the New Horizons launch. There are no other known political or legal obstacles to the flight. The environmental impact statement is available online (http://spacescience.nasa.gov/admin/pubs/plutoeis/index.htm).
Even with a powerful Atlas 5 rocket, launching New Horizons directly to Pluto would take some 14 years. Instead, NASA plans to shave five years off the trip by launching New Horizons on a trajectory that will carry it past Jupiter in early 2007. Streaking 1.4 million miles from the planet's cloud tops at 47,000 mph, New Horizons will gain a gravitational boost amounting to an additional 9,000 mph. That's what gets the probe to Pluto by July 14, 2015.
But to take advantage of Jupiter, NASA must launch New Horizons by Feb. 6. While the 2006 launch window extends to Feb. 14, a launch in the last week of the window would result in a Pluto flyby in 2020. Jupiter is not an option at all if the flight slips to 2007.
Pluto currently is on the outbound leg of its elliptical orbit, moving away from the sun. With every year that passes, 77,000 square miles of Pluto's surface disappears into shadow, lost to view from a passing spacecraft. Equally pressing, astronomers believe Pluto's atmosphere will literally freeze out and fall to the surface in the coming years as the planet recedes from the warmth of the sun.
"Some of those atmospheric species are actually going to freeze up just like when you put water in a ice tray and put it in a freezer," Weaver said. "The little layer of water vapor above it, all that freezes out into ice cubes. Well, the same thing is probably going to happen to Pluto. We don't know exactly when it's going to happen, sometime probably within the next few decades."
In short, the science community feels a fair amount of pressure to get New Horizons off the ground before Feb. 6.
NASA originally hoped to launch the mission Jan. 11, but the flight was put on hold for a last-minute investigation to resolve lingering questions about a fuel tank problem that cropped up last year.
Because the New Horizons rocket is the first Atlas 5 to be equipped with five solid-fuel boosters, an RP-1 first stage fuel tank - the part of the rocket solid-fuel boosters attach to - was deliberately over pressurized to demonstrate its ability to handle excessive "loads." The test tank cracked at about 90 psi, twice the normal flight pressure, and an investigation was ordered.
Flight tanks, including the one in the New Horizons rocket, were boroscoped and found to be in good condition. NASA ordered a second inspection to make sure and a Lockheed Martin official said "the Atlas team is absolutely ready to go." NASA agreed the Atlas 5 had a positive margin of safety, but details of a flight readiness review Thursday are not yet known, including how many engineers might have dissented.
If all goes well, the huge rocket's Russian-built RD-180 first stage engine and five solid-fuel boosters will roar to life at 1:24 p.m. Tuesday, the opening of a one-hour 59-minute launch window. While a typical Atlas 5 climbs above its launch gantry in 12 seconds or so, the New Horizons rocket, with its lightweight payload, will take just six seconds as it thunders skyward and then arcs out over the Atlantic Ocean.
Using a hydrogen-powered Centaur second stage, the Atlas will put New Horizons in an elliptical "parking orbit" with an apogee, or high point, of 191 miles and a perigee, or low point, of 102 miles. Twenty-two minutes later, the Centaur will reignite, boosting New Horizons into an orbit around the sun carrying it as far as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
For the final kick needed to send the craft to Jupiter, a solid-fuel Boeing Star 48 rocket motor will ignite about 43 minutes after liftoff and burn for about a minute and a half. New Horizons will separate from the spent booster a few minutes later, on its own for the remainder of the long voyage to Pluto.
"The launch carries us out over the Atlantic. By the time we are over the Indian Ocean, we've acquired enough velocity to send us on our way to Pluto," said Project Manager Glen Fountain. "Leaving Earth, the New Horizons will be traveling at eight miles per second. Eight hours later, the spacecraft will pass the orbit of the moon. Remember that the Apollo astronauts took some three days to cover that distance."
Here are launch milestones at a glance (in minutes and seconds after launch):
Guidance to inertial: T-00:08.0
RD-180 main engine ignition: T-00:02.7
Engine operation and thrust at flight level: 00:00.0
Liftoff: 00:01.1
Booster jettison (1,2): 01:46.7
Booster jettison (3,4,5): 01:48.2
Nose cone fairing jettison: 03:23.4
First stage main engine cutoff: 04:27.6
First stage/Centaur second stage separation 04:33.6
Centaur first main engine start (MES1): 04:43.6
Centaur first main engine cutoff (MECO1): 10:06.2
Centaur second main engine start (MES2): 32:22.6
Centaur second main engine cutoff (MECO2): 42:02.2
Centaur/third-stage separation: 42:15.2
Third stage Star48B engine start: 42:52.2
Star48B engine burnout: 44:20.1
Spacecraft separation 47:47.2
Mission managers are not just taking advantage of Jupiter for a gravity assist flyby. They're going to use the planet for an end-to-end test of the spacecraft's instruments, using the encounter as a dress rehearsal for Pluto.
"We will be the eighth mission to Jupiter," Stern said. "One of the dirty little secrets of New Horizons is we'll be returning more bits (of data) from Jupiter than from Pluto because we have much greater bandwidth. ... We have a wide variety of experiments planned to test out our instruments, but also to fill in the gaps and to answer some of the questions the Galileo mission left us with."
NASA's hugely successful Galileo orbiter mapped and studied Jupiter's major moons, its radiation environment and its cloudy atmosphere in unprecedented detail. But an antenna malfunction limited the amount of data it could beam back to Earth, forcing scientists to forego some planned observations of the atmosphere that required enough pictures to make movies. New Horizon will fill in many of those blanks.
In addition, the spacecraft's trajectory will carry it down Jupiter's magnetotail as it flies away into deep space, giving scientists an unprecedented chance to study the teardrop-shaped region of space around Jupiter that is shaped and defined by the planet's powerful magnetic field.
"Our route of flight from Jupiter to Pluto takes us directly down Jupiter's magnetotail out to a thousand jovian radii," Stern said. "This is just a spectacular opportunity for magnetospheric science, nothing like this has ever been flown at any planet. Even at the Earth, there's never been an equivalent fly through of a magnetotail like this."
New Horizons will photograph Jupiter's aurora, its major satellites and a modest ring discovered by the Voyager spacecraft.
"So it's going to be a busy time," Stern said.
But once past Jupiter, NASA plans to put New Horizons into electronic hibernation, fully waking up just once a year for detailed health checks. It will cross the gulf between Jupiter and Pluto spinning at 5 rpm with its high-gain antenna constantly pointed toward Earth.
"The spacecraft will be put to sleep into a hibernation mode with very few subsystems active after we complete the Jupiter gravity assist," said David Kusnierkiewicz, mission systems engineer at Johns Hopkins. "This will conserve some of the useful operating lifetime of the electronics."
New Horizons will, however, broadcast simple diagnostic "beacon" tones that will be listened to once a week by NASA's Deep Space Network of tracking antennas. A coded "green" tone will indicate the spacecraft is healthy. One of seven coded "red" tones will be beamed back if a problem is detected.
"This will be the first operation we've used such a beacon mode, to broadcast the status of the spacecraft and its health back to Earth," Kusnierkiewicz said. "We will listen to this beacon about once a week during the period from Jupiter to Pluto in order to make sure the spacecraft is healthy ... and we'll respond accordingly."
New Horizons is small compared to the school bus-sized Cassini currently in orbit around Saturn, measuring just 27-by-83-by-108 inches and weighing 1,054 pounds at launch, of which 170 pounds is hydrazine maneuvering fuel. It's roughly triangular and about the size of a piano.
The probe is equipped with a single RTG for electrical power and seven state-of-the-art science instruments, including a radio system that will be used to both communicate with Earth and to collect valuable data about Pluto's tenuous atmosphere. The compact instruments typically operate on less power than a night light - two to 10 watts each. Recalling "The Honeymooners" TV series and Ralph Kramden's frequent outbursts of "to the moon, Alice," two of the instruments are named Ralph and Alice.
Operating more than 30 times farther from the sun than Earth, New Horizons is built like a thermos bottle and insulated to retain the heat generated by its electrical systems. Internal temperatures between 50 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit are expected throughout the mission, but small heaters are available just in case it gets colder than expected.
"The New Horizons payload is the most compact, low-power, high-performance payload yet to fly on a U.S. planetary mission for a first reconnaissance flyby," said William Gibson, New Horizons science payload manager.
The instruments are:
- Alice: A 10-pound ultraviolet imaging spectrometer built by the Southwest Research Institute to study the structure and composition of Pluto's atmosphere. It also will be used to look for signs of a charged ionosphere around Pluto and any traces of an atmosphere around Charon.
- Ralph: A 23-pound telescope/camera system developed by Ball Aerospace Corp., NASA's Goddard Space Flight center and the Southwest Research Institute that includes a multi-spectral visible-light camera with seven black-and-white and color CCD detectors and a single infrared channel for spectroscopic studies. Operating in light 1,000 times dimmer than on Earth, Ralph will photograph the sunlit surfaces of Pluto and Charon, providing stereoscopic views, measuring the temperature and mapping abundances of nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and water ice. In black-and-white mode, the camera will be able to discern surface features three-tenths of a mile across (0.9 miles across in color mode and 4.3 miles in infrared mode).
- Radio Science Experiment (REX): This is a 3.5-ounce circuit board incorporated in the spacecraft's radio system that was developed by Johns Hopkins and Stanford University. As the spacecraft flies behind Pluto and Charon, radio waves from Earth will be bent slightly as they pass through atmospheric gases. By characterizing those subtle changes, scientists will be able to gain insights into atmospheric temperature and pressure.
- LORRI (long-range reconnaissance imager): A 19-pound digital camera equipped with an 8.2-inch telescope serving as a telephoto lens that will be used for optical navigation on the way to Pluto. At close approach, LORRI, developed by Johns Hopkins, should be capable of detecting surface features as small as 82 feet across. Ninety days out from Pluto, LORRI's pictures will be 10,000 times sharper than current images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
- SWAP (Solar Wind at Pluto): Developed by the Southwest Research Institute, SAP will study how Pluto interacts with the solar wind. Scientists believe Pluto loses about 165 pounds of its atmosphere every second. That material is then ionized by sunlight and carried away on the solar wind.
- PEPSSI (Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation): A 3.3-pound spectrometer developed by Johns Hopkins to study material escaping from Pluto's atmosphere as well as the atmosphere itself.
- SDC (Student Dust Counter): The only instrument that will remain on for the duration of the new Horizons Mission, the SDC was developed by students at the University of Colorado at Boulder to measure microscopic dust grains in interplanetary space.
"When we arrive at Pluto, we'll be photographing everything in the system at high resolution," Stern said. "The best we can do now with the Hubble, despite all of its capabilities, is about 400 or 500 kilometers (250 to 310 miles) per pixel. That is like putting a state in a single pixel.
"We're going to change that. We'll map everything that is sunlit in the system at one kilometer resolution. And with our long focal length narrow angle camera, called LORRI, we'll be doing Landsat-class resolution as good as 25-to-50 meters per pixel in selected areas. That accounts for the satellites as well as Pluto itself."
Spin stabilized on the way to Pluto, New Horizons will use small hydrazine thrusters to change its orientation as required for scientific observations based on data provided by redundant gyroscopes, accelerometers and star trackers.
The computational horsepower needed to operate the spacecraft and carry out programmed commands from Earth is provided by a radiation-hardened Mongoose V processor running at 12 megahertz.
Data will be stored on two redundant eight-gigabyte solid-state recorders and later beamed back to Earth. New Horizons is equipped with two low-gain antennas for communications when the spacecraft is near Earth, a 12-inch medium-gain dish antenna and an 83-inch-wide fixed dish antenna for use with a high-speed X-band communications system.
But at Pluto's enormous distance from Earth - so far radio signals will take four hours and 25 minutes for a one-way trip - data transmission will occur at a glacial 700 bits per second. As a result, it will take a full nine months to beam back all of the data collected during the Pluto flyby.
Pluto orbits the sun in an elliptical orbit tilted 17 degrees to the plane of the other planets. The orbit comes as close as 2.8 billion miles to the sun and as far as 4.6 billion miles. Between 1979 and 1999, Pluto was closer to the sun than Neptune. It takes the planet 247 years to complete a single orbit, or plutonian year, and it currently is moving away from the sun.
The ice dwarf is tipped over on its side and has a diameter of about 1,460 miles. Gravity is about 6 percent of Earth's and surface temperatures are as low as 387 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Astronomers have detected spectroscopic signs of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, methane and ice on the surface. The planet has an extremely thin atmosphere composed of nitrogen with small amounts of methane, carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons.
Pluto and its large moon Charon whirl about each other every 6.4 days. Charon is 12,200 miles from Pluto and both worlds turn in gravitational lockstep, always keeping the same face toward each other. Pluto's two other, much smaller known moons orbit two to three times farther out than Charon.
Little more is known about the Pluto system, not surprising given the planet is 50,000 times fainter than Mars when viewed from Earth.
To carry out its mission, New Horizons must traverse some 3 billion miles and then hit a keyhole in space just 186 miles across, a target point at the far end of the launch trajectory that will allow the spacecraft to pass midway between Pluto and Charon.
Detailed observations will begin about five months before the flyby, collecting data that will help flight planners fine-tune the spacecraft's course. Starting about three months out, at a distance of about 62 million miles, New Horizons will begin mapping Pluto and Charon. A few weeks later, the spacecraft's images will become sharper than those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Daily observations will commence one month before the encounter.
By that point, scientists hope to know whether two recently discovered moons - and others that may be discovered between now and then - have contributed to any as-yet-unseen rings of debris around Pluto that could pose a threat to the spacecraft as it zips through the system. Stern said New Horizons should still have half a tank of hydrazine rocket fuel left by then, more than enough to change course if necessary to avoid any threats. "Our plan, however, is to fly about halfway between Pluto and Charon, splitting that difference between them," he said. "But it's contingent upon some work we need to do with the Hubble Space Telescope To ensure we avoid any potential debris field ... associated with the orbits of the small satellites, which might generate rings in the system.
"We would want to make sure we would not fly through rings or ringlets. We want to do deeper searches for additional satellite and we want to pin down their orbits so as we fly through that bullÕs-eye, we fly between satellite orbits with good separation and not at the distances that ring system debris may be present."
While trying to avoid danger, the new moons offer an unexpected scientific opportunity.
"It looks because of the geometry we might actually be able to fly pretty close to both of those satellites, maybe one of them before we encounter Pluto and one after," Weaver said. "My own personal feeling right now is we almost have a family here. We have the mother and the father, Pluto and Charon, and these objects seem to be rotating around Pluto all in the same plane. It looks like the same event that produced Pluto and Charon, which was probably catastrophic collision that caused all heck to break loose, a whole bunch of stuff formed a debris disc and you had Pluto and Charon forming. In addition to that in the little disc of material that was left over probably had enough clumpiness in it and maybe these little moons formed."
But Pluto and Charon are the main reason for launching New Horizons, along with the opportunity to study a second Kuiper Belt object in the years after the main encounter.
"At the time of the Voyager missions in the early 70s, the importance of Pluto and, of course, the Kuiper belt, because it wasn't discovered (yet), wasn't appreciated at all," Stern said. "It wasn't very high on the priority list because we didn't realize how much it had to teach us about the origin of the solar system and some of the kinds of physics, particularly atmospheric physics, that we want to learn about. Today, with our better knowledge of the geography of our solar system, we see how central it is to modern planetary science."
New Horizons' close encounter with Pluto will last a full day, 12 hours before and after. The spacecraft cannot enter orbit around the planet because no current rocket can launch a probe carrying enough fuel to arrest the velocity needed to get it there in a reasonable amount of time.
Approaching from the planet's southern hemisphere, the spacecraft will pass within about 5,500 miles of Pluto's surface at 31,300 mph, streaking well inside the orbit of Charon. Fourteen minutes later, the probe will fly past Charon at a distance of 16,800 miles. Fifty-one minutes after Pluto closest approach, New Horizons will disappear behind the planet as viewed from Earth. Two hours and 15 minutes past Pluto closest approach, the spacecraft will pass behind Charon as viewed from Earth, giving the radio science team a chance to look for signs of an atmosphere.
At Pluto's distance from Earth, it will take several hours to transmit a single image back to Earth. High-priority observations will be sent back right away, but it will take nine months to transmit the complete data set.
Weaver said the Pluto-Charon system is unique in the known solar system.
"If you think about this mission in the context of comparative planetology, we have the terrestrial planet region in the inner solar system comprised of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars," he said. "Pluto and Charon and the Kuiper Belt objects are nothing like those rocky objects. Then you have the gas giants, the ones that are dominated by thick atmospheres of molecular hydrogen and helium - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And then we have the final new frontier in the solar system, the realm of the icy dwarfs and that's what Pluto, Charon and the KB objects belong to. And that has not yet been explored.
"Another interesting thing about Pluto and Charon is they're the only example in the solar system of a binary planet," Weaver continued. "They're more like brothers or sisters than a planet and a moon. They're sort of at one end of the spectrum. Most of the planet-moon systems have much bigger discrepancies between the mass and the size of the planet and its moon and Pluto and Charon are at the other end of the spectrum. By understanding how all of these things formed, that's going to tell us something about planetary dynamics and the inner solar system from the time of its formation.
"Another interesting aspect of Pluto is that it does have an atmosphere and in fact, that's one of the reasons why it's being called a planet. But PlutoÕs atmosphere is weird. It's sort of a transitional case between a traditional planetary atmosphere and a cometary atmosphere, which is not connected to the object at all, it just flies off into space. It's in between. Pluto does have a bound atmosphere but it also has some escaping gases. In fact, it's the only current planet in the solar system whose atmosphere is in the process right now of hydrodynamic escape.
"And not only does the gas escape, as Pluto moves father away from the sun and gets colder and colder, what eventually will happen is the atmosphere will freeze out onto the surface," Weaver said. "We want to get to Pluto with New Horizons before that atmosphere freezes out so we can learn something about Pluto's atmosphere, which in turn will tell us something more generally about the formation and evolution of planetary atmospheres."
Before New Horizons gets to Pluto, astronomers plan to select a second Kuiper Belt object for close-up observations. Plenty of fuel is expected to be available for any necessary course change and the RTG power source should provide enough electricity to operate the instrument package for a full 10 years beyond the Pluto flyby.
"Pluto, of course, is embedded in the Kuiper Belt, the largest structure in our planetary system, dotted with almost a half million worlds and worldlets that are four billion years old," Stern said. "In a real sense, this is not just a journey four billion miles away but also four billion years back in time. It's really no wonder, because of the value of this ancient structure to our understanding of the origin of the solar system, that the National Academy (of Sciences) ranked this mission number one on the runway for a new start in this decade among medium-sized planetary missions like New Horizons."
But Pluto is the star of the show.
"It's a very unusual pair of worlds, the first binary planet system we've ever explored and the first ice dwarf, a whole new class of planets," Stern said. "Whereas we know of four terrestrial planets and four gas giants, we expect there are hundreds, if not thousands, of these ice dwarfs. So this class of planets, which we have not yet reconnoitered, is in reality the most populous class of planetary body in our solar system. That's what this mission is about.
"Some of the other attributes of the Pluto system that make it interesting is it's a scientific wonderland for atmospheric scientists. Its atmosphere is escaping like a comet, but on a planetary scale. It's surface, which is only 40 degrees above absolute zero, is covered in exotic ices, it has strong seasonal and global change effects that we already know are taking place."
"You can see why we think it's going to be like kids in a candy shop when we arrive in a system like this," Stern said. "It just keeps getting better."
New Horizons science goals
FROM MISSION PRESS KIT
Posted: January 8, 2006
Based largely on what the scientific community wanted to learn about Pluto and Charon, NASA prioritized its science goals for Pluto-system exploration in three categories:
Required
- Characterize the global geology and morphology of Pluto and Charon
- Map surface composition of Pluto and Charon
- Characterize the neutral atmosphere of Pluto and its escape rate
Important
- Characterize the time variability of Pluto's surface and atmosphere
- Image Pluto and Charon in stereo
- Map the terminators (day/night lines) of Pluto and Charon in high resolution
- Map the composition of selected areas of Pluto and Charon at high resolution
- Characterize Pluto's ionosphere and solar wind interaction
- Search for neutral species (including hydrocarbons and nitriles) in Pluto's upper atmosphere
- Search for an atmosphere around Charon
- Determine bolometric bond albedos for Pluto and Charon
- Map the surface temperatures on Pluto and Charon
Desired
- Characterize the energetic particle environment of Pluto and Charon
- Refine bulk parameters (radii, masses, densities) and orbits of Pluto and Charon
- Search for magnetic fields of Pluto and Charon
- Search for additional satellites and rings
NASA defines mission success as meeting the "required" objectives. With its full science payload -- three optical instruments, two plasma instruments, a radio science receiver/radiometer and a dust sensor - New Horizons expects to exceed these requirements, meeting or addressing all of the objectives in each category.
MONDAY, JANUARY 16, 2006
2125 GMT (4:25 p.m. EST)
The initial portion of Atlas 5 rocket fueling operations is nearing completion for tomorrow's launch of the New Horizons spacecraft. Lockheed Martin technicians are close to finishing the pumping of about 25,000 gallons of kerosene fuel into the rocket's first stage. That propellant will be consumed with liquid oxygen to power the vehicle's Russian-designed RD-180 main engine during the first four-and-a-half minutes of launch.
The first stage liquid oxygen supply, along with the super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen for the Centaur upper stage, will be loaded into the rocket during the final two hours of tomorrow's countdown.
The launch team will be wrapping up today's planned activities and securing the rocket for the evening. Countdown work resumes before dawn tomorrow when the Atlas 5 is powered up at about 5:24 a.m. EST. Routine pre-flight tests of vehicle systems and preparations for cryogenic fueling are among the chores during the morning.
At 10:44 a.m., the count will enter a planned 30-minute built-in hold at the T-minus 120 minute mark. This pause gives the launch team the opportunity to catch up on any work running behind the timeline or deal with technical glitches. A poll of team members occurs five minutes before the end of the hold to verify everyone is ready for liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen fueling.
Chilling of propellant lines and tanks is performed to thermally condition the equipment in preparation for flowing the super-cold fuels. Centaur liquid oxygen loading should begin at about 11:31 a.m., followed by Atlas first stage liquid oxygen and finally Centaur hydrogen fueling.
A final hold is planned at T-minus 4 minutes. This will be a 10-minute hold starting at 1:10 p.m. EST to conduct readiness polls of senior management, the launch team members, Range and weather. If all elements are deemed "go" for launch, the clock will resume ticking at 1:20 p.m.
The launch window extends from 1:24 to 3:23 p.m. EST.
Atlas 5 rollout:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av010/060116rollout/11.jpg
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av010/060116rollout/12.jpg
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av010/060116rollout/14.jpg
The Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket was rolled from the Vertical Integration Facility to the Complex 41 launch this morning.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av010/060116rollout/nasa1.jpg
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av010/060116rollout/nasa5.jpg
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av010/060116rollout/nasa6.jpg
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av010/060116rollout/nasa7.jpg
Ancora poche ora al lancio.. anche se dovremo aspettare appunto questi 8-9 anni per vedere i risultati di tutti gli sforzi del team ;)
The computational horsepower needed to operate the spacecraft and carry out programmed commands from Earth is provided by a radiation-hardened Mongoose V processor running at 12 megahertz.
Interessante capire con che classi di microprocessori viaggiano i veicoli spaziali..
http://www.cpushack.net/space-craft-cpu.html
http://klabs.org/DEI/Processor/Mongoose/
This paper describes high reliability radiation hardened computers built by Sandia for application aboard Department Of Energy (DOE) Satellite programs requiring 32-bit processing. The computers highlight a radiation hardened (1 Mrad(Si)) R3000 executing up to 10 Million Reduced Instruction Set Instructions (RISC) Per Second (MIPS), a dual purpose module control bus used for real-time fault and power management which allows for extended mission operation on as little as 1.2 watts, and a Local Area Network capable of 480 Megabits per second. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the NASA Goddard R3000 nicknamed the "Mongoose or Mongoose 1". The Sandia Satellite Computer (SSC) uses Rational’s Ada compiler, debugger, operating system kernel, and Enhanced Floating Point Emulation Library targeted at the Mongoose.
http://www.synova.com/Images_new/chip_coverMary.jpg
http://www.synova.com/proc/mg5.html
Frank1962
17-01-2006, 15:00
sulla ISS un 386 !? ...ma si vogliono male alla nasa/esa? ......io ci avrei messo un MIPS R10000 :D :D
sulla ISS un 386 !? ...ma si vogliono male alla nasa/esa? ......io ci avrei messo un MIPS R10000 :D :D
:D
cmq il Mongoose V e' ancora piu' semplicee' infatti basato sul core di un R3000 :fagiano:
Frank1962
17-01-2006, 15:18
:D
cmq il Mongoose V e' ancora piu' semplicee' infatti basato sul core di un R3000 :fagiano:
alla fine se un processore vuole definirsi RISC non può avere una isa complessa più di tanto .....e poi cmq MIPS è sempre MIPS!!! :D ;) :D
1614 GMT (11:14 a.m. EST)
T-minus 120 minutes and counting! Today's countdown is marching forward for launch of the Atlas 5 rocket and New Horizons headed for Pluto. Clocks have one more built-in hold planned at T-minus 4 minutes. That pause will last 10 minutes, giving the launch team one last chance to catch up on work running late or deal with any problems.
1614 GMT (11:14 a.m. EST)
Chilldown thermal conditioning of the mobile launch platform upon which the rocket stands is beginning. This is meant to ease the shock on equipment when supercold cryogenic propellants start flowing into the rocket a short time from now.
1621 GMT (11:21 a.m. EST)
The Centaur liquid oxygen pad storage area has been prepped. The next step is conditioning the transfer lines, which is now beginning to prepare the plumbing for flowing the cryogenic oxidizer.
1624 GMT (11:24 a.m. EST)
Liftoff is now two hours away. Pressure checks of the Atlas 5 rocket's first stage fuel tank have been completed. That tank was loaded with about 25,000 gallons of kerosene propellant yesterday afternoon.
1628 GMT (11:28 a.m. EST)
Following the thermal conditioning of the transfer pipes, filling of the Centaur upper stage with 4,300 gallons of liquid oxygen has begun at Cape Canaveral's Complex 41.
The liquid oxygen -- chilled to Minus-298 degrees F -- will be consumed during the launch by the Centaur's single RL10 engine along with liquid hydrogen to be pumped into the stage a little later in the countdown. The high-energy Centaur will perform two firings today to propel the New Horizons spacecraft out of Earth orbit.
1634 GMT (11:34 a.m. EST)
The Centaur liquid oxygen tank is now 10 percent full.
1641 GMT (11:41 a.m. EST)
About 40 percent of the Centaur liquid oxygen tank has been filled so far.
1812 GMT (1:12 p.m. EST)
Engineers have determined the first stage liquid oxygen fill and drain valve issue is not a constraint. The issue is understood.
1813 GMT (1:13 p.m. EST)
NEW LAUNCH TIME! Liftoff has been delayed to 1:45 p.m. EST due to gusty ground winds. Also, the valve issue needs to be wrapped up.
1838 GMT (1:38 p.m. EST)
NEW LAUNCH TIME! Liftoff has been postponed again. The new target is 2:10 p.m. EST. The further delay allows the team to assess the high-altitude winds and generate a flight profile based on those conditions.
1842 GMT (1:42 p.m. EST)
A new flight profile load is being created from the upper level wind speed and direction information gathered by weather balloons sent up from the Cape through the countdown.
duchetto
17-01-2006, 18:46
cos'è quel fumo che fuoriesce dal vettore?
IcEMaN666
17-01-2006, 18:47
sto seguendo su nasa live...c'è un vento della madonna secondo me non parte...gli alberi si muovono come fruscelli:mc:
IcEMaN666
17-01-2006, 18:48
cos'è quel fumo che fuoriesce dal vettore?
l'umidità dell'aria a contatto con il propellente liquido (ossigeno e idrogeno) dovrebbe essere
cos'è quel fumo che fuoriesce dal vettore?
è lo sfiato dalla valvola della condotta dell'ossigeno.
1855 GMT (1:55 p.m. EST)
NEW LAUNCH TIME. Liftoff has been pushed back to 2:30 p.m. EST.
IcEMaN666
17-01-2006, 18:58
sbaglio o ha appena detto new T0 alle 2.30?
sbaglio o ha appena detto new T0 alle 2.30?
esatto, T-0 è il momento del lancio.
1900 GMT (2:00 p.m. EST)
The upper level winds remain "no go" at this time. The latest flight profile did not find acceptable conditions. Also of concern, the pad winds remain right at the constraint red line limit.
There are no other technical problems being addressed. Countdown clocks continue to hold at T-minus 4 minutes, targeting a possible liftoff time of 2:30 p.m. EST.
IcEMaN666
17-01-2006, 19:16
ma ci sono problemi tecnici a tenere il propellente criogenico per tutta la notte nel serbatoio? secondo me oggi non partono...
IcEMaN666
17-01-2006, 19:25
non ho capito tutto quello che ha detto ma il T-0 è spostato a tempo indeterminato..e il contatore è a T-4minuti..o ho capito male?:fagiano:
ma ci sono problemi tecnici a tenere il propellente criogenico per tutta la notte nel serbatoio? secondo me oggi non partono...
impossibile, deve essere continuamente refilllato perchè evapora a causa dell'atmosfera più calda ed umida. Inoltre ci cono ovvie questioni di sicurezza.
Ad ogni interruzione di lancio le cisterne vengono scaricate...
duchetto
17-01-2006, 19:29
fino a che ora può avvenire il lancio per oggi?
1924 GMT (2:24 p.m. EST)
NEW LAUNCH TIME. Clocks are being reset for liftoff at 2:50 p.m. EST. Today's available launch window extends to 3:23 p.m. EST.
non ho capito tutto quello che ha detto ma il T-0 è spostato a tempo indeterminato..e il contatore è a T-4minuti..o ho capito male?:fagiano:
il tempo ufficiale è quello indicato dal contatore, attualmente è fermo all'ultimo hold programmato. Gli hold possono essere mantenuti indefinitivamente.
fino a che ora può avvenire il lancio per oggi?
la launch window finisce alle 3:23 EST (21:23 ora italiana).
mo' il vento muove anche le telecamere oltre. chissa' che riescano a ricalcolare la traiettoria di volo in tempo prima che la finestra di lancio si chiuda..
1939 GMT (2:39 p.m. EST)
The Cape launch team has received the latest flight profile for loading into the rocket. Officials are awaiting confirmation that the profile can withstand the current upper level winds.
1942 GMT (2:42 p.m. EST)
NEW LAUNCH TIME! Launch has been postponed to 3:05 p.m. EST.
1957 GMT (2:57 p.m. EST)
NEW LAUNCH TIME! The launch time is being retargeted for the very end of today's window at 3:23 p.m. EST due to the ground level winds.
IcEMaN666
17-01-2006, 20:05
non parte:mc:
2020 GMT (3:20 p.m. EST)
The countdown has been halted at T-minus 2 minutes, 34 seconds due to a red limit monitor fault. This scrubs today's launch attempt of the New Horizons spacecraft since the window is closing at 3:23 p.m. There isn't enough time to recycle the clock, fix the issue and try again.
2023 GMT (3:23 p.m. EST)
Tomorrow's launch window extends from 1:16 to 3:15 p.m. EST.
Tocchera' aspettare fino a domani.. :(
avete parlato di nasalive prima .. quacuno mi passa l'url ?
Nuovo tentativo oggi, apertura finestra alle 19:16.
Previsioni meteo danno il 70% di condizioni accettabili.
avete parlato di nasalive prima .. quacuno mi passa l'url ?
NASA TV (Real): http://www.nasa.gov/ram/35037main_portal.ram
NASA TV (WindowsMedia): http://www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows.asx
duchetto
18-01-2006, 09:35
avete parlato di nasalive prima .. quacuno mi passa l'url ?
http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1369080&segment=149773
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2006
1459 GMT (9:59 a.m. EST)
SCRUB! Today's launch attempt has been called off. The New Horizons mission control center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory suffered a power outage this morning. The backup system using generators is not sufficient to proceed with the launch. So the first mission to Pluto will remain on Earth for another day.
Tomorrow's launch window extends from 1:08 to 3:07 p.m. EST.
1459 GMT (9:59 a.m. EST)
A management meeting is planned for 4 p.m. EST this afternoon to determine if the New Horizons control center in Maryland will be ready for a launch attempt tomorrow or whether more time is needed. The Atlas launch team is moving forward with a 24-hour scrub turnaround timeline to preserve the option of flying tomorrow.
Maryland storms delay New Horizons launch
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: January 18, 2006
Already running a day behind because of high winds in Florida, NASA's New Horizons Pluto mission was grounded today by storms in Maryland that knocked out power to the spacecraft control center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory near Washington.
An emergency generator kicked in to keep the control center in operation, but spacecraft managers were not comfortable proceeding with a launch attempt today without a backup system in place.
If primary power is restored, or if another generator can be moved in and hooked up in time, NASA will proceed with another launch attempt Thursday at 1:08 p.m. If not, launch will be delayed again. A decision on how to proceed is expected later today.
"If we were in flight, we would not have an issue with this," said Alan Stern, the New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "We have a backup, we're running on backup right now. But I was not willing to launch on the backup because it means we don't have a backup (if something else goes wrong)."
To reach Pluto, New Horizons must launch by Feb. 14 or the flight will be delayed to next year. But mission managers hope to get the $700 million mission off the ground by Jan. 28 to take advantage of Jupiter's gravity for a planned 2007 flyby that will boost the probe's velocity by 9,000 mph and get it to Pluto by 2015. After Jan. 28, the arrival date begins slipping and by the end of the launch window, an additional five years is required to reach the target.
Stern is optimistic it won't come to that.
"I've got 28 days to get the thing launched," he said today at the Kennedy Space Center. "That's a lifetime. We'll probably fly tomorrow, maybe the next day. ... I have this mental image of a padlock with 11,000 tumblers and when they're all right, we'll fly. Yesterday, we had 10,999. Today we have a different 10,999. One day, they'll all line up."
Assuming power is restored in time, NASA and rocket-builder Lockheed Martin hope to launch New Horizons atop an Atlas 5 heavy-lift rocket at 1:08 p.m. Thursday. The launch window extends to 3:07 p.m. The launch window Friday opens at 1 p.m. and closes at 2:59 p.m.
Here is an updated timeline of major ascent events For a Jan. 19 launch (all times in EST):
TIME...............T+MM:SS...EVENT
01:08:00 PM...T-00:08...Guidance to inertial
01:08:00 PM...T-00:03...RD-180 ignition
01:08:00 PM...T+00:01...Liftoff
01:08:05 PM...T+00:05...Start RD-180 throttle down for max Q
01:08:27 PM...T+00:27...Roll, pitch, yaw maneuver complete
01:08:24 PM...T+00:44...Max Q (900 psf)
01:09:34 PM...T+01:34...SRB burnout
01:09:47 PM...T+01:47...SRB jettison (1,2)
01:09:48 PM...T+01:48...SRB jettison (3,4,5)
01:11:23 PM...T+03:23...Payload fairing jettison
01:11:28 PM...T+03:28...Forward load reactor jettison
01:12:28 PM...T+04:28...Booster engine cutoff
01:12:34 PM...T+04:34...Atlas/Centaur separation
01:12:44 PM...T+04:44...Centaur main engine start (MES) 1
01:18:06 PM...T+10:06...Centaur main engine cutoff (MECO) 1
01:40:37 PM...T+32:37...Centaur MES 2
01:50:16 PM...T+42:16...Centaur MECO 2 (altitude: 157 sm)
01:50:26 PM...T+42:26...Spacecraft/Star 48B spinup
01:50:29 PM...T+42:29...Centaur/Star 48B separation
01:51:06 PM...T+43:05...Star 48B ignition
01:52:33 PM...T+44:33...Star 48B burnout (altitude: 238 sm)
01:56:01 PM...T+48:00...Spacecraft separation
Whenever it finally blasts off, New Horizons will depart Earth at a record 10 miles per second, passing the moon's orbit in just nine hours and reaching Jupiter in just 13 months.
Even so, it will take the nuclear-powered New Horizons another eight years to reach Pluto, flying past the frozen world in July 2015 before streaking on into the Kuiper Belt, a broad disk of icy dwarf worlds left over from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
Equipped with a half-dozen sophisticated instruments, New Horizons is expected to return a treasure trove of information about the outer solar system, including the first close-up images of Pluto and its oversize moon, Charon.
si intravede una specie di vapore bianco proveniente da un serbatoio.... si tratta del propellente?
duchetto
19-01-2006, 17:22
sbaglio o le condizioni del tempo sono molto più promettenti dell'altro ieri?
sbaglio o le condizioni del tempo sono molto più promettenti dell'altro ieri?
Dai che lanciano fra 40 minuti!
http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/showpost.php?p=10946292&postcount=41...
si vede benissimo in diretta wow
1803 GMT (1:03 p.m. EST)
Liftoff has been reset for 1:13 p.m. EST, the Range says.
1805 GMT (1:05 p.m. EST)
NEW LAUNCH TIME! The launch will be pushed back further to 1:25 p.m. EST to wait for the cloud cover to clear.
1810 GMT (1:10 p.m. EST)
The low clouds have been drifting ashore from the Atlantic all morning. There are small breaks in the cloud cover that gives hope of launching through a hole.
1810 GMT (1:10 p.m. EST)
The Range says it cannot support a 1:25 p.m. launch.
1811 GMT (1:11 p.m. EST)
NEW LAUNCH TIME! Liftoff has been re-targeted again. Launch is now set for 1:30 p.m. EST.
1812 GMT (1:12 p.m. EST)
This extra five minutes allows the Range to complete another sweep of the restricted area around the launch site.
Frank1962
19-01-2006, 18:21
....ma quel fumo biano che esce che cosa è? a che serve? ...a segnare la direzione del vento?
1820 GMT (1:20 p.m. EST)
Liftoff time is now 10 minutes away. Everyone is awaiting word whether the Range Safety is "go" for launch.
1821 GMT (1:21 p.m. EST)
Range is 'no go' for launch at 1:30 p.m. because of clouds obscuring the optics for tracking the rocket at liftoff.
....ma quel fumo biano che esce che cosa è? a che serve? ...a segnare la direzione del vento?
ma no! :D
lo ripeto ad ogni nuova missione... è l'ossigeno (il comburente) che evapora per il contatto con l'atmosfera dalla valvola di sfiato della feeding line.
1823 GMT (1:23 p.m. EST)
NEW LAUNCH TIME. The Atlas team is targeting 1:40 p.m. EST.
1825 GMT (1:25 p.m. EST)
The cloud rule at issue here in the ceiling limit. Range Safety requires that it can track the rocket unobstructed through the first 6,000 feet of flight.
1827 GMT (1:27 p.m. EST)
The new timeline calls for the launch team readiness poll at 1:33 p.m., resumption of the countdown at 1:36 p.m. and liftoff at 1:40 p.m. EST (1840 GMT), if the clouds will allow.
1829 GMT (1:29 p.m. EST)
Range is 'go' for launch! The cloud conditions are now acceptable, safety officials have determined.
1831 GMT (1:31 p.m. EST)
Range is 'no go' now!
1831 GMT (1:31 p.m. EST)
The clouds are still the problem. The Range had reported its approval for launch at 1:40 p.m., then a few minutes later said the cloud ceiling rule would prevent liftoff at the latest in a series of new launch times set today.
1833 GMT (1:33 p.m. EST)
Another launch time has not been selected yet. Countdown clocks remain holding at T-minus 4 minutes.
1840 GMT (1:40 p.m. EST)
Engineers are loading an updated flight profile into the rocket's guidance computer based on the latest upper level winds. This is necessary because the preview profile expired at 1:45 p.m.
1842 GMT (1:42 p.m. EST)
A firm launch time target has not been established yet. But officials are looking at 1:55 p.m. as the earliest.
1846 GMT (1:46 p.m. EST)
NEW LAUNCH TIME. Liftoff is officially reset for 2:00 p.m., weather permitting.
1849 GMT (1:49 p.m. EST)
The Range says it is "go" for launch at 2:00 p.m.!
1852 GMT (1:52 p.m. EST)
The NASA management team has reported it is "go" for launch.
1853 GMT (1:53 p.m. EST)
The Lockheed Martin Atlas launch team has been polled again to ensure all systems are still in readiness after this extended hold. No problems were reported.
1853 GMT (1:53 p.m. EST)
The Atlas launch director Jerry Jamison has voiced his "go" for liftoff at 2:00 p.m.
1855 GMT (1:55 p.m. EST)
Countdown clocks will resume in one minute. We are now five minutes from launch.
1856 GMT (1:56 p.m. EST)
T-minus 4 minutes and counting. The final phase of today's countdown has begun for the launch of Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 and the New Horizons spacecraft bound for Pluto!
1856 GMT (1:56 p.m. EST)
T-minus 3 minutes, 45 seconds. Ground pyrotechnics have been enabled.
1857 GMT (1:57 p.m. EST)
T-minus 2 minutes, 45 seconds. New Horizons has been declared "go" for launch.
supermario
19-01-2006, 19:02
che figata! :eek: :eek: :eek:
1900 GMT (2:00 p.m. EST)
LIFTOFF! Liftoff of the Atlas 5 rocket launching New Horizons to Pluto and beyond -- the first mission of exploration to the outer frontier of our solar system!
1859 GMT (1:59 p.m. EST)
T-minus 20 seconds. "Go Atlas," "Go Centaur" called by launch team, verifying all systems are ready.
1859 GMT (1:59 p.m. EST)
T-minus 1 minute. New Horizons is poised to begin its flight of exploration and discovery.
1858 GMT (1:58 p.m. EST)
T-minus 80 seconds. The third stage is armed.
1858 GMT (1:58 p.m. EST)
T-minus 90 seconds. Launch control system is enabled. The Flight Termination System has been armed.
1858 GMT (1:58 p.m. EST)
T-minus 1 minute, 50 seconds. The automatic computer sequencer is in control of all the critical events through liftoff.
1900 GMT (2:00 p.m. EST)
LIFTOFF! Liftoff of the Atlas 5 rocket launching New Horizons to Pluto and beyond -- the first mission of exploration to the outer frontier of our solar system!
1900 GMT (2:00 p.m. EST)
T+plus 20 seconds. The main engine is easing back to two-thirds throttle to help the vehicle's passage through the area of maximum aerodynamic pressure.
1903 GMT (2:03 p.m. EST)
T+plus 3 minutes. No problems have been reported during this seventh launch of Lockheed Martin's Atlas 5 rocket. Teh rocket is 50 miles up, 59 miles downrange and traveling at 6,800 mph.
1902 GMT (2:02 p.m. EST)
T+plus 2 minutes. The Atlas 5 continues powering to space solely on the RD-180 first stage main engine now. The powerplant will keep its throttle setting at 100 percent until reaching 2.5 G's acceleration. Then the engine ramps down the throttle to maintain two-and-a-half times gravity through jettison of the rocket's nose cone, expected about 85 seconds from now.
1901 GMT (2:01 p.m. EST)
T+plus 1 minute, 55 seconds. All five solid rocket boosters have been jettisoned from the Atlas 5, having completed their job of adding a powerful kick at liftoff. The Aerojet-made boosters are the world's longest single-segment solids.
1901 GMT (2:01 p.m. EST)
T+plus 100 seconds. The five solid rocket boosters have burned out. They will remain attached to the vehicle for a little while longer, with two separating at T+plus 1 minute, 47 seconds and the other three spent casings jettisoning one-and-a-half seconds later.
1901 GMT (2:01 p.m. EST)
T+plus 75 seconds. Main engine is throttling down to 75 percent is preparation for burnout of the solid rocket boosters. After the five solid-propellant motors have consumed all of their fuel and that burnout detection is made, the Atlas 5 will throttle the RD-180 engine back to 100 percent thrust.
1901 GMT (2:01 p.m. EST)
T+plus 60 seconds. One minute into the flight of Atlas 5 and New Horizons. The rocket is roaring skyward on a mission to give humanity its first up-close look at the planet Pluto.
1900 GMT (2:00 p.m. EST)
T+plus 45 seconds. The RD-180 first stage engine is throttling up to 86 percent. The Max Q region has been passed and the greater thrust will increase the rocket's control authority and performance.
1904 GMT (2:04 p.m. EST)
T+plus 4 minutes. Less than a half-minute remaining in the first stage burn. The rocket is 67 miles up, 78 miles downrange and traveling at 9,800 mph.
1903 GMT (2:03 p.m. EST)
T+plus 3 minutes, 50 seconds. The two-halves of the Atlas 5 rocket nose cone encapsulating the New Horizons spacecraft have separated. The Pluto-bound probe is now exposed to space. Also jettisoned was the Forward Load Reactor, a two-piece deck that rings the Centaur stage to support the bulbous fairing during launch.
Eight seconds after the shroud jettison, the RD-180 engine will throttle up to 100 percent again until reaching 5 G's. Throttle eases back to hold the five times gravity until 11 seconds before engine cutoff. It then throttles down to 4.6 G's to sense propellant depletion for engine shutdown.
Dan Dylan
19-01-2006, 19:06
Io ho atteso tanto il lancio, ma ho scoperto che l'orologio del mio computer è avanti! Che bello il lancio e il stacco dei razzi!!!
1904 GMT (2:04 p.m. EST)
T+plus 4 minutes, 42 seconds. Centaur's RL10 main engine has ignited!
1904 GMT (2:04 p.m. EST)
T+plus 4 minutes, 38 seconds. Main engine cutoff confirmed. And the first stage has been jettisoned!
1905 GMT (2:05 p.m. EST)
T+plus 5 minutes, 30 seconds. Centaur is up and firing. The rocket is 93 miles in altitude, 591 miles downrange and traveling over 14,000 mph.
1905 GMT (2:05 p.m. EST)
T+plus 5 minutes, 30 seconds. Centaur is up and firing. The rocket is 93 miles in altitude, 591 miles downrange and traveling over 14,000 mph.
1907 GMT (2:07 p.m. EST)
T+plus 7 minutes. Centaur has performed a planned roll maneuver to align with NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System for communications.
1907 GMT (2:07 p.m. EST)
T+plus 7 minutes. Centaur has performed a planned roll maneuver to align with NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System for communications.
1908 GMT (2:08 p.m. EST)
T+plus 8 minutes, 30 seconds. Less than two minutes remain in this first burn of Centaur. The rocket is 110 miles above Earth and traveling over 16,000 mph.
1909 GMT (2:09 p.m. EST)
T+plus 9 minutes. The Atlas 5 is tracking right now the planned flight track.
1909 GMT (2:09 p.m. EST)
T+plus 9 minutes, 30 seconds. The vehicle is 10,628 miles downrange, speeding along at 16,852 mph.
1907 GMT (2:07 p.m. EST)
T+plus 7 minutes, 30 seconds. No problems reported with the RL10 engine or Centaur operations.
1908 GMT (2:08 p.m. EST)
T+plus 8 minutes, 30 seconds. Less than two minutes remain in this first burn of Centaur. The rocket is 110 miles above Earth and traveling over 16,000 mph.
1909 GMT (2:09 p.m. EST)
T+plus 9 minutes. The Atlas 5 is tracking right now the planned flight track.
1909 GMT (2:09 p.m. EST)
T+plus 9 minutes, 30 seconds. The vehicle is 10,628 miles downrange, speeding along at 16,852 mph.
1910 GMT (2:10 p.m. EST)
T+plus 10 minutes, 12 seconds. MECO 1. Centaur's main engine has cut off following its first burn this morning. The rocket will coast in this preliminary orbit for about 20 minutes before the RL10 is reignited to propel New Horizons out of Earth orbit.
1911 GMT (2:11 p.m. EST)
T+plus 11 minutes. The Centaur stage is reorienting itself following the first burn.
Frank1962
19-01-2006, 19:15
...ma perchè quando fanno i lanci dell'esa la stessa non li mette in realtime su internet come fa la nasa? :(
supermario
19-01-2006, 19:18
600 miglia in 5 minuti.
:cry: :cry:
...ma perchè quando fanno i lanci dell'esa la stessa non li mette in realtime su internet come fa la nasa? :(
ESA TV trasmette via satellite, per i lanci da Baikonour il webcast lo fa di solito Starsem (la società russo-europea che opera Soyuz), mentre quelli da Kourou li fa direttamente Arianespace sul suo sito, www.arianespace.com... ed è pure il più bello perchè a lato del video hai i dati della telemetria e l'immagine 2D del vettore con la traiettoria, la velocità, l'accelerazione, l'altitudine, ecc.
1914 GMT (2:14 p.m. EST)
T+plus 14 minutes. Centaur is in a gentle roll to keep the thermal heating even across the stage.
1917 GMT (2:17 p.m. EST)
T+plus 17 minutes. The rocket has reached the proper parking orbit altitude around Earth.
1920 GMT (2:20 p.m. EST)
T+plus 20 minutes. About 10 minutes remain until the RL10 engine is reignited.
1924 GMT (2:24 p.m. EST)
T+plus 24 minutes, 40 seconds. Centaur continues to roll at one degree per second. Rates are normal.
1927 GMT (2:27 p.m. EST)
T+plus 27 minutes, 30 seconds. The stage is performing a maneuver to improve antenna pointing for relay coverage.
1928 GMT (2:28 p.m. EST)
T+plus 28 minutes, 45 seconds. Tank pressures on the Centaur are reported normal as the coast mode continues.
1929 GMT (2:29 p.m. EST)
T+plus 29 minutes, 59 seconds. Centaur is firing again! The single RL10 engine has reignited as planned for a nine-and-a-half minute burn to accelerate New Horizons out of Earth orbit for the journey across the solar system. This firing will put the orbit out to the asteroid belt.
1930 GMT (2:30 p.m. EST)
T+plus 30 minutes, 12 seconds. Engine performance looks good.
1930 GMT (2:30 p.m. EST)
T+plus 30 minutes, 12 seconds. Engine performance looks good.
1931 GMT (2:31 p.m. EST)
T+plus 31 minutes. Centaur continues to perform well.
1933 GMT (2:33 p.m. EST)
T+plus 33 minutes. The RL10 engine is burning its mixture of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.
1934 GMT (2:34 p.m. EST)
T+plus 34 minutes, 10 seconds. All Centaur systems still reported normal.
1935 GMT (2:35 p.m. EST)
T+plus 35 minutes, 30 seconds. Just under four minutes left in this firing of the RL10 engine. After the Centaur completes this burn, the solid-fuel third stage will spin up and separate with the New Horizons spacecraft. The third stage then ignites to accelerate the probe to Pluto.
1937 GMT (2:37 p.m. EST)
T+plus 37 minutes, 40 seconds. Engine performance and chamber pressures look good as this lengthy burn continues.
1938 GMT (2:38 p.m. EST)
T+plus 38 minutes, 30 seconds. A minute to engine cutoff.
ESA TV trasmette via satellite, per i lanci da Baikonour il webcast lo fa di solito Starsem (la società russo-europea che opera Soyuz), mentre quelli da Kourou li fa direttamente Arianespace sul suo sito, www.arianespace.com... ed è pure il più bello perchè a lato del video hai i dati della telemetria e l'immagine 2D del vettore con la traiettoria, la velocità, l'accelerazione, l'altitudine, ecc.
link alla diretta by arianespace ???
1939 GMT (2:39 p.m. EST)
T+plus 39 minutes, 26 seconds. MECO 2! The Centaur's Pratt & Whitney RL10 engine has shut down as expected.
1939 GMT (2:39 p.m. EST)
T+plus 39 minutes, 45 seconds. Third stage separation! The upper stage has spun up and separated from the spent Centaur.
1940 GMT (2:40 p.m. EST)
T+plus 40 minutes, 30 seconds. The solid-fueled ATK-made Star 48 motor is up and firing with good pressures reported.
1941 GMT (2:41 p.m. EST)
T+plus 41 minutes. The third stage was provided by Boeing. The Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket has now completed its job in the launch.
1941 GMT (2:41 p.m. EST)
T+plus 41 minutes, 41 seconds. Third stage burnout. The motor has finished its firing over the Indian Ocean.
1942 GMT (2:42 p.m. EST)
T+plus 42 minutes, 20 seconds. Deployment of the spacecraft from the third stage is less than three minutes away.
1944 GMT (2:44 p.m. EST)
T+plus 44 minutes. No problems have been reported during today's launch.
1944 GMT (2:44 p.m. EST)
T+plus 44 minutes, 55 seconds. SPACECRAFT SEPARATION! The New Horizons spacecraft has been released from the third stage! The probe has departed Earth for its voyage to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.
1946 GMT (2:46 p.m. EST)
New Horizons will fly past Jupiter next February, receiving a sling-shot boost from the giant planet's gravity to speed the trip to the outskirts of the solar system. The spacecraft will make its close encounter with Pluto on July 14, 2015.
A che velocità starà andando ora?......
1950 GMT (2:50 p.m. EST)
NASA Launch Manager Omar Baez says today's launch of New Horizons spacecraft has been success. The probe appears to be right on the mark.
A post-launch press conference is coming up in about an hour to provide more information on the spacecraft's health and status.
A che velocità starà andando ora?......
La velocità di fuga è poco più di 16 km/s, ma Giove la spingerà a circa 21 km/s il prossimo mese.
link alla diretta by arianespace ???
http://www.videocorner.tv/index.php?langue=en
Il prossimo (Ariane 5 ECA) è il 21 febbraio 2006.
2109 GMT (4:09 p.m. EST)
NASA's Deep Space Network tracking station in Canberra, Australia acquired the first signals from the newly-launched New Horizons spacecraft at 2:50 p.m. EST, about five minutes after the third stage separation. Telemetry from the probe indicates all systems are operating normally, project manager Glen Fountain says.
The RTG nuclear power source aboard the craft is generating 180 watts right now. That will build up to 240 watts during the next few hours. Over 200 watts of power will be expected when New Horizons reaches Pluto.
2118 GMT (4:18 p.m. EST)
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern confirms that ashes of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh are aboard the spacecraft. The American astronomer found Pluto in 1930.
New Horizons launches on voyage to Pluto and beyond
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: January 19, 2006
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. (CBS) - A supercharged Atlas 5 rocket carrying NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons probe roared to life and vaulted away from Earth today on a three-billion-mile, nine-year voyage to the frigid edge of the solar system.
Breaking away from Earth's gravity at some 10 miles per second - 36,000 mph - the nuclear-powered robotic spacecraft was expected to cross the moon's orbit just nine hours after liftoff and to reach Jupiter for a velocity boosting flyby in just 13 months.
Coasting through space at least 100 times faster than a commercial jetliner throughout its one-way voyage, it will still take New Horizons nine years to reach the most famous member of the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy debris left over from the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
"God has laid out the solar system in a way that requires a certain amount of patience on the part of we who choose to explore it," said NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. "I have nothing but admiration for the folks who invest this kind of time and effort and energy to make these wishes come true."
If all goes well, New Horizons will race by Pluto in July 2015, passing within 5,500 miles of the frozen, 1,460-mile-wide planet at 31,300 mph. Fourteen minutes later, the spacecraft will pass by Charon at a distance of 16,800 miles.
At Pluto's enormous distance from Earth - so far it will take light some 4.5 hours to cross the gulf - it will take days to transmit even a few high-priority images back to Earth. The spacecraft will need nine months to transmit the complete data set.
But that data, the goal of the $700 million mission, will mark a milestone in the history of space exploration as New Horizons scientifically unveils the only "planet" - and some argue about that designation - in the solar system that has not yet visited by humans or robotic spacecraft.
"This is, in a very real sense, the capstone of the initial reconnaissance of the planets that the United States has led for the world since the 1960s," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
"We're going farther to reach our target and we're travelling faster than any spacecraft ever has. This is a little bit about leadership, a little bit about re-writing the textbooks about the outer planets. But I also want to point out it's also about inspiring the next generation of scientists and explorers, who we hope will take us to even greater heights."
Said project scientist Hal Weaver: "New Horizons is the first mission to the last planet. It's going to perform a detailed reconnaissance of Pluto and its companion, Charon. We're actually not going to stop there. We're going to continue to fly past Pluto deep into the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons is going to be going where no other mission has ever been, so it truly is a mission of exploration and discovery."
Pluto was discovered in 1930 by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who died in 1997 at age 90. But his 93-year-old wife, Patricia, was invited to the New Horizons launch by Stern. Asked Sunday what her husband would say about the current debate over whether Pluto is a bona fide planet, Patricia Tombaugh said, 'you know what he'd say in frustration? 'It's there. So we're going there to see what's there.'"
To launch the 1,054-pound New Horizons with enough speed to find out "what's there"in a reasonable amount of time, NASA bought a Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 heavy-lift booster equipped with five strap-on solid-fuel boosters generating a combined 2.5 million pounds of thrust.
The 20-story rocket was rolled to its launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station early Monday, but a launch try Tuesday was called off due to high winds and a second attempt Wednesday ended when storms in Maryland knocked out power to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory spacecraft control center.
But today, after extending a final "hold" nearly an hour to let low clouds thin out, the the Atlas 5 roared to life at 2 p.m. and climbed above its launch gantry in less than six seconds - twice as fast as normal.
Climbing vertically atop a trail of incandescent flame for the first few seconds, the Atlas 5 accelerated through the sound barrier about 45 seconds after liftoff and quickly arced East over the Atlantic Ocean through a partly cloudy sky. The solid rocket motors burned out about a minute and a half into flight, falling back to Earth trailing white contrails, while the Atlas continued its ascent atop a tongue of orange flame from its Russian-built RD-180 engine.
The first stage engine shut down and fell away four-and-a-half minutes after launch followed seconds later by the ignition of a hydrogen-fueled Centaur second stage. In the first of two "burns," the Centaur boosted New Horizons into a so-called parking orbit with a low point, or perigee, of about 101 miles and a high point, or apogee, of around 132 miles. After a 20-minute coast, the Centaur reignited, pushing New Horizons out of Earth orbit and into an orbit around the sun that, if nothing else was done, would only carry the craft as far as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
To get the kick needed to reach Jupiter and the outer solar system, New Horizons relied on a Star 48B solid-fuel motor that accelerated the small spacecraft to a departure velocity of some 10 miles per second, on course for a flyby of Jupiter in February 2007.
To carry out its mission, New Horizons must traverse some 3 billion miles and then hit a keyhole in space just 186 miles across, a target point at the far end of the launch trajectory that will allow the spacecraft to pass midway between Pluto and Charon.
Detailed observations will begin about five months before the flyby, collecting data that will help flight planners fine-tune the spacecraft's course. Starting about three months out, at a distance of about 62 million miles, New Horizons will begin mapping Pluto and Charon. A few weeks later, the spacecraft's images will become sharper than those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Daily observations will commence one month before the encounter.
By that point, scientists hope to know whether two recently discovered moons - and others that may be discovered between now and then - have contributed to any as-yet-unseen rings of debris around Pluto that could pose a threat to the spacecraft as it zips through the system. Stern said New Horizons should still have half a tank of hydrazine rocket fuel left by then, more than enough to change course if necessary to avoid any threats.
New Horizons' close encounter with Pluto will last a full day, 12 hours before and after. The spacecraft cannot enter orbit around the planet because no current rocket can launch a probe carrying enough fuel to arrest the velocity needed to get it there in a reasonable amount of time.
Asked about the value of the New Horizons mission to the average taxpayer, Griffin said "I would ask the question of you what value to you do you think it might be to be able to examine the primordial constituents from which the solar system and all the planets and we ourselves were formed? Because it is believed the Kuiper Belt contains the remnant objects from the formation of the solar system that never coalesced into planets, or mostly didn't coalesce into planets, because they were simply too far out.
"I can't predict, I'm not smart enough or skilled enough to be able to predict what that value might be. But it is fantastically interesting to me to have a chance, maybe within my lifetime, for scientists to see up close what those objects look like and to begin our reconnaissance of that region of space."
visto che nn ho voglia di leggere e tradurre, mi dite alla fine del suo viaggio a che velocità si allontanerà da sistema solare? e mi dite a che velocità si stanno allontanando le sonde lanciate decenni fa?
grazie, ciao
duchetto
19-01-2006, 22:43
alla radio hanno detto che è partito alle 19:08 :rolleyes:
alla fine del suo viaggio a che velocità si allontanerà da sistema solare?
21 km/s
a che velocità si stanno allontanando le sonde lanciate decenni fa?
non mi ricordo esattamente, le 2 Voyager viaggiano a circa 17,2 km/s ma stanno rallentando progressivamente mentre incontrano l'eliopausa (circa 120 km/h all'anno).
ma la sonda Ulisse perchè allora viaggia piu velocemente quasi 40km/s.... se cosi fosse (magari ricordo male) perchè non hanno usato la stessa tecnica?
Frank1962
20-01-2006, 08:18
ma la sonda Ulisse perchè allora viaggia piu velocemente quasi 40km/s.... se cosi fosse (magari ricordo male) perchè non hanno usato la stessa tecnica?
..credo sia dovuto al tipo di lanciatore che hanno usato in questa missione, mi pare relativamente piccolo per dare una notevole spinta ....avrebbero potuto usare un proton russo!! lol ....o anche un saturn V ma credo che sarebbe costata moooolto di più la missione $$ !!! (anche perchè il saturn non esiste più lol)
razziadacqua
20-01-2006, 12:43
Partita!!!Buon viaggio!-.....see you from 15years :°°D
21 km/s
non mi ricordo esattamente, le 2 Voyager viaggiano a circa 17,2 km/s ma stanno rallentando progressivamente mentre incontrano l'eliopausa (circa 120 km/h all'anno).
se i dati fossero questi non mi pare che han fatto sto gran progresso con le velocità :mc:
..credo sia dovuto al tipo di lanciatore che hanno usato in questa missione, mi pare relativamente piccolo per dare una notevole spinta ....avrebbero potuto usare un proton russo!! lol ....o anche un saturn V ma credo che sarebbe costata moooolto di più la missione $$ !!! (anche perchè il saturn non esiste più lol)
L'Atlas V è dei due pià grandi EELV, l'altro è il Delta IV... entrambi sono più potenti del Proton... L'Atlas V utilizzato per il lancio di ieri è un 551, in grado lanciare un payload di 8672 kg in GTO, mentre il Proton al massimo arriva a 2.920 kg in GTO, anche arriva a 21 tonnellate come i due sopra in LEO.
Il rivale dell'Atlas V e del Delta IV è l'Angara.
se i dati fossero questi non mi pare che han fatto sto gran progresso con le velocità :mc:
ma che progresso dovrebbero fare con vettori chimici?
Partita!!!Buon viaggio!-.....see you from 15years :°°D
9 anni e mezzo esatti.
ma la sonda Ulisse perchè allora viaggia piu velocemente quasi 40km/s.... se cosi fosse (magari ricordo male) perchè non hanno usato la stessa tecnica?
Ulysse al massimo ha raggiunto gli 80.000 km/h, che sono circa 22 km/s, ma è in orbita polare attorno al sole, grazie al cazzo... :D
NH è stata lanciata a circa 10 e arriva a 21 con la sola spinta gravitazionale di Giove...
Frank1962
20-01-2006, 16:36
L'Atlas V è dei due pià grandi EELV, l'altro è il Delta IV... entrambi sono più potenti del Proton... L'Atlas V utilizzato per il lancio di ieri è un 551, in grado lanciare un payload di 8672 kg in GTO, mentre il Proton al massimo arriva a 2.920 kg in GTO, anche arriva a 21 tonnellate come i due sopra in LEO.
Il rivale dell'Atlas V e del Delta IV è l'Angara.
....uhm ...il più potente vettore quanto può portare su? (disco gto e oltre)
ma che progresso dovrebbero fare con vettori chimici?
vabbè ma solo con i materiali più leggeri della sonda dovrebbero fare un po' di miglioramenti in velocità
....uhm ...il più potente vettore quanto può portare su? (disco gto e oltre)
il più potente lanciatore espandibile al mondo (intendiamo vettori Heavy-Lift Launch Veichles o HLLV), per tonnellate trasportabili in orbita bassa, è con ampio margine l'Energia LV dell'NPO Energia (www.energia.ru). Fu creato per il lo shuttle sovietico Buran negli anni '70, ma dalla fine del programma non è stato più utilizzato. La portata dichiarata è di 100 tonnellate in LEO, ma le versione più spinta poteva superare quella del Saturn V e del sovietico N1.
Molte parti dell'Energia oggi vivono in altri lanciatori, come gli Zenit boosters, utilizzati proprio sugli Atlas, il motore RD-0120, di cui proprio l'Atlas V usa un derivato, l'RD-180.
Tra i lanciatori esistenti il più potente era il Titan IV (21 ton in LEO, 5.8 in GTO), fino al suo pensionamento nel 2005.
Tra quelli ancora in servizio ed in configurazione standard quello che ha maggiore portata in LEO è l'Ariane 5 ES ATV della francese EADS (per il lancio del cargo ISS ATV), che arriva a 21 tonnellate in LEO e per il GTO l'Ariane 5 ECA con circa 10,5 tonnellate in GTO (il più potente al mondo in questo lancio). Seguono poi a ruota il Delta IV Heavy di Boeing IDS e, appunto, l'Atlas V. Questo almeno finchè non saranno pronti il russo Angara (sostituto del Proton) e il cinese Chang Zheng 5, con un massimo di 26 tonnellate in LEO.
vabbè ma solo con i materiali più leggeri della sonda dovrebbero fare un po' di miglioramenti in velocità
Quel poco che puoi guadagnare con leghe leggere e materiali composito o organici lo utilizzi in genere per aggiungere strumenti, ecc... e cmq di sicuro non è determinante a variare sensibilmente la veolcità di una sonda. Anche perchè arrivare su Plutone un giorno o due prima non fa differenza su 9 anni di viaggio, che già sono molto meno di 14-15 che occorrerebbero in condizioni normali, senza sfruttare allineamento, distanza minima e spinta gravitazionale.
mi spiegate come funziona la fionda gravitazionale?
Frank1962
21-01-2006, 10:29
il più potente lanciatore espandibile al mondo (intendiamo vettori Heavy-Lift Launch Veichles o HLLV), per tonnellate trasportabili in orbita bassa, è con ampio margine l'Energia LV dell'NPO Energia (www.energia.ru). Fu creato per il lo shuttle sovietico Buran negli anni '70, ma dalla fine del programma non è stato più utilizzato. La portata dichiarata è di 100 tonnellate in LEO, ma le versione più spinta poteva superare quella del Saturn V e del sovietico N1.
Molte parti dell'Energia oggi vivono in altri lanciatori, come gli Zenit boosters, utilizzati proprio sugli Atlas, il motore RD-0120, di cui proprio l'Atlas V usa un derivato, l'RD-180.
Tra i lanciatori esistenti il più potente era il Titan IV (21 ton in LEO, 5.8 in GTO), fino al suo pensionamento nel 2005.
Tra quelli ancora in servizio ed in configurazione standard quello che ha maggiore portata in LEO è l'Ariane 5 ES ATV della francese EADS (per il lancio del cargo ISS ATV), che arriva a 21 tonnellate in LEO e per il GTO l'Ariane 5 ECA con circa 10,5 tonnellate in GTO (il più potente al mondo in questo lancio). Seguono poi a ruota il Delta IV Heavy di Boeing IDS e, appunto, l'Atlas V. Questo almeno finchè non saranno pronti il russo Angara (sostituto del Proton) e il cinese Chang Zheng 5, con un massimo di 26 tonnellate in LEO.
..e io che pensavo fosse lo shuttle quello che potesse portare più tonnellate in orbita! ...ma allora perchè non usano l'arianne per finire la iss invece di aspettare sto rtf?
..e io che pensavo fosse lo shuttle quello che potesse portare più tonnellate in orbita! ...ma allora perchè non usano l'arianne per finire la iss invece di aspettare sto rtf?
Lo Space Shuttle Discovery arriva, per motivi di configurazione leggermente differente dai "fratelli" a 25 tonnellate (il massimo dello Shuttle) ma a parte che non è un lanciatore espandibile, al massimo ha portato 15 tonnellate, mentre ad esempio il sovietico Buran ne trasportò circa 20 e poteva arrivare a 30.
Tuttavia lo Shuttle finirà la carriera per terminare il più possibile la ISS, non è privista alcuna missione diversa esclusa la Servicing Mission 4 per l'Hubble. Inoltre è troppo costoso oltre che come manutenzione anche come esercizio ed è per questo che dai primi anni '90 non viene più utilizzato per mettere in orbita satelliti.
Il vero punto di forza dello Shuttle è la dimensione ed in particolare la larghezza della payload bay (18 x 4,6 m). E' per questo che gran parte dell'hardware della ISS è trasportato sullo Shuttle ed è anche per questo che è estremamente improbabile che l'hardware già costruito e pronto per essere installato (in particolare gli ultimi array di pannelli solari, i moduli Kibo e Columbus, la Cupola, ecc.) possa essere lanciato con altri sistemi.
Altro motivo per cui è richiesto lo shuttle è l'installazione dei moduli in orbita. Al momento solo lo Shuttle può eseguire questa operazione, è necessario il braccio robotizzato (Canadarm) dell'orbiter e quello della ISS e il solo equipaggio della ISS non potrebbe comunque farlo senza l'aiuto lo Shuttle e il suo equipaggio.
Piuttosto si è deciso concentrare le utlime missioni dello Shuttle per il lancio dell'hardware che richiede esplicitamente l'orbiter americano e trasferire su altri lanciatori, Proton, Ariane, il carico rimanente, in particolare sull'ATV lanciato dall'Ariane 5.
jumpermax
21-01-2006, 11:25
ma che progresso dovrebbero fare con vettori chimici?
io pensavo che avessero montato un motore ionico... chissà di quanto avrebbe accorciato la missione. Sai perchè non l'hanno fatto?
io pensavo che avessero montato un motore ionico... chissà di quanto avrebbe accorciato la missione. Sai perchè non l'hanno fatto?
Intanto occorre chiarire che questo sistema è utilizzabile su satelliti e sonde, ma per il lancio è sempre necessario un lanciatore, e per questo non esistono ne sono convenienti ne altrettanto sicure sistemi alternativi. Detto ciò, questo tipo di sistema seppur ideato per la prima volta 50 anni fa dal team di Von Brawn, è ancora in fase sperimentale (ad oggi sono solo due le misioni di test, Deep Space 1 della NASA e SMART-1 dell'ESA), e comunque occorrerebbe un quantitativo non tanto diverso di gas xenon per raggiungere un corpo celeste oltre Giove rispetto al gas tradizionale (idrazina), pur ottenendo teoricamente dieci volte la spinta ottenibile con propellente tradizionale.
Cmq a proposito di propulsione a ioni (sarebbe il caso di fare un 3d a parte), una notizia assai interessante è questa rilasciata qualche giorno fa dall'ESA:
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMOSTG23IE_index_0.html
ESA and ANU make space propulsion breakthrough
11 January 2006
The European Space Agency and the Australian National University have successfully tested a new design of spacecraft ion engine that dramatically improves performance over present thrusters and marks a major step forward in space propulsion capability.
Ion engines are a form of electric propulsion and work by accelerating a beam of positively charged particles (or ions) away from the spacecraft using an electric field. ESA is currently using electric propulsion on its Moon mission, SMART-1. The new engine is over ten times more fuel efficient than the one used on SMART-1. “Using a similar amount of propellant as SMART-1, with the right power supply, a future spacecraft using our new engine design wouldn’t just reach the Moon, it would be able to leave the Solar System entirely,” says Dr Roger Walker of ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team, Research Fellow in Advanced Propulsion and Technical Manager of the project.
The new experimental engine, called the Dual-Stage 4-Grid (DS4G) ion thruster, was designed and built under a contract with ESA in the extremely short time of four months by a dedicated team at the Australian National University. “The success of the DS4G prototype shows what can be achieved with the passion and drive of a capable and committed team. It was an incredible experience to work with ESA to transform such an elegant idea into a record-breaking reality”, says Dr. Orson Sutherland, the engine’s designer and leader of the development team at the ANU's Space Plasma, Power and Propulsion group." During November 2005, the DS4G engine was tested for the first time in ESA’s Electric Propulsion Laboratory at ESTEC in the Netherlands, with support from Dr Sutherland and ESA test engineers.
Traditional ion engines use three closely separated perforated grids containing thousands of millimetre-sized holes attached to a chamber containing a reservoir of the charged particles. The first grid has thousands of volts applied, and the second grid operates at low voltage. The voltage difference over the gap between the two grids creates an electric field that acts to simultaneously extract and accelerate the ions out of the chamber and into space in a single step. The higher the voltage difference, the faster the ions are expelled and the greater the fuel efficiency of the thruster. However, at higher voltage differences approaching five thousand volts (5kV), some of the ions collide with the second grid as they are accelerated, thus eroding and damaging the grid and thereby limiting its lifetime in space.
The DS4G ion engine utilises a different concept first proposed in 2001 by David Fearn, a pioneer of ion propulsion in the UK, which solves this limitation by performing a two-stage process to decouple the extraction and acceleration of ions using four grids. In the first stage, the first two grids are closely spaced and both are operated at very high voltage and a low voltage difference between the two (3 kV) enables the ions to be safely extracted from the chamber without hitting the grids. Then, in the second stage, two more grids are positioned at a greater distance ‘downstream’ and operated at low voltages. The high voltage difference between the two pairs of grids powerfully accelerates the extracted ions.
The test model achieved voltage differences as high as 30kV and produced an ion exhaust plume that travelled at 210,000 m/s, over four times faster than state-of-the-art ion engine designs achieve. This makes it four times more fuel efficient, and also enables an engine design which is many times more compact than present thrusters, allowing the design to be scaled up in size to operate at high power and thrust. Due to the very high acceleration, the ion exhaust plume was very narrow, diverging by only 3 degrees, which is five times narrower than present systems. This reduces the fuel needed to correct the orientation of spacecraft from small uncertainties in the thrust direction.
There is of course still a great deal of work to be done before the new engine design can fly in space. “Working with our industrial partners, the next challenge is to transition this promising new engine design from laboratory experiment to spacecraft flight model and properly define the new missions that it will enable”, says José Gonzalez del Amo, Head of Electric Propulsion at ESA. The flight-suitable engines must then be tested: and for ion engines this is a long process.
Since they must operate continuously in space for tens of thousands of hours providing a small thrust, ground tests in a vacuum facility must last several thousand hours to prove their reliability. Only after all this could the first flight models be launched.
Once ready, these engines will be able to propel spacecraft to the outermost planets, the newly discovered planetoids beyond Pluto and even further, into the unknown realm of interstellar space beyond the Solar System. Closer to home, these supercharged ion engines could figure prominently in the human exploration of space. With an adequate supply of electrical power, a small cluster of larger, high power versions of the new engine design would provide enough thrust to propel a crewed spacecraft to Mars and back.
“This is an ultra-ion engine. It has exceeded the current crop by many times and opens up a whole new frontier of exploration possibilities,” says Dr Walker.
Cmq a proposito di propulsione a ioni (sarebbe il caso di fare un 3d a parte), una notizia assai interessante è questa rilasciata qualche giorno fa dall'ESA:
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMOSTG23IE_index_0.html
ESA and ANU make space propulsion breakthrough
[CUTTONE]
Very interesting! D'accordo anche sull'idea di aprire un thread apposta per la propulsione ionica, l'argomento mi interessa! :cool:
jumpermax
21-01-2006, 16:40
Intanto occorre chiarire che questo sistema è utilizzabile su satelliti e sonde, ma per il lancio è sempre necessario un lanciatore, e per questo non esistono ne sono convenienti ne altrettanto sicure sistemi alternativi. Detto ciò, questo tipo di sistema seppur ideato per la prima volta 50 anni fa dal team di Von Brawn, è ancora in fase sperimentale (ad oggi sono solo due le misioni di test, Deep Space 1 della NASA e SMART-1 dell'ESA), e comunque occorrerebbe un quantitativo non tanto diverso di gas xenon per raggiungere un corpo celeste oltre Giove rispetto al gas tradizionale (idrazina), pur ottenendo teoricamente dieci volte la spinta ottenibile con propellente tradizionale.
beh però le missioni sono state un successo... ero convinto fosse una tecnologia ormai matura per un utilizzo in missioni normali. Anche perchè insomma, maggiore è la distanza da percorrere più i motori ionici sono convenienti...
beh però le missioni sono state un successo... ero convinto fosse una tecnologia ormai matura per un utilizzo in missioni normali. Anche perchè insomma, maggiore è la distanza da percorrere più i motori ionici sono convenienti...
si ma tieni conto anche che sono sicuramente il futuro ma oggi ancora costosi rispetto alla propulsione chimica, inoltre le sonde sperimentali pesano assai meno di quelle maggiori come NH, Rosetta, Cassini, ecc... ed inoltre il problema più grande è sempre la sorgente di energia... grandi pannelli solari forniscono molta pià energia degli RTG, e missioni nel sistema solare esterno non consentono l'uso di pannelli solari.
In quanto e' stimato il consumo elettrico di questi prototipi di propulsori ionici? (intendo delle griglie a potenziali decrescenti e le circuiterie accessorie)
Un RTG sarebbe sufficiente o ce ne vorrebbe piu' d'uno?
Inoltre forse sarebbe anche possibile che l'RTG stesso fornisca, o comunque contribuisca, a liberare le particelle cariche grazie al suo decadimento radioattivo.
(il calore generato potrebbe poi essere comunque utilizzato per produrrre l'energia elettrica..)
In quanto e' stimato il consumo elettrico di questi prototipi di propulsori ionici? (intendo delle griglie a potenziali decrescenti e le circuiterie accessorie)
Un RTG sarebbe sufficiente o ce ne vorrebbe piu' d'uno?
Inoltre forse sarebbe anche possibile che l'RTG stesso fornisca, o comunque contribuisca, a liberare le particelle cariche grazie al suo decadimento radioattivo.
(il calore generato potrebbe poi essere comunque utilizzato per produrrre l'energia elettrica..)
tieni conto che due array di pannelli solari eroano anche 400 W, un solo RTG eroga max 250 W...
tieni conto che due array di pannelli solari eroano anche 400 W, un solo RTG eroga max 250 W...
certo, mi riferivo ad un potenziale utilizzo del propoulsore a ioni per missioni a lunga distanza.. a proposito fino a che distanza dal sole e' conveniente utilizzare pannelli? fino a marte ok, anche oltre?
Tnx!
certo, mi riferivo ad un potenziale utilizzo del propoulsore a ioni per missioni a lunga distanza.. a proposito fino a che distanza dal sole e' conveniente utilizzare pannelli? fino a marte ok, anche oltre?
Tnx!
Oltre Marte servono pannelli con una superficie più vasta di almeno il doppio... il che diventa assai difficile. I più grandi pannelli solari sono quelli della missione europea Rosetta.
razziadacqua
22-01-2006, 23:44
Oh Gio_FX mi raccomando tra una 15ina di anni ci devi informare a tutti in diretta sui risultati della missione :D quanto meno mettici la sveglia eh!
Mi piacciono da matti queste cose a luuuuungo termine.
;)
GIO_FX grandissimo!
P.S.(OT) oh la missione su Europa?...con la sondina trivellatrice??...che fin ha fatto?
P.S.(OT) oh la missione su Europa?...con la sondina trivellatrice??...che fin ha fatto?
Se intendi JIMO, è stato cancellato l'hanno scorso.
Se intendi JIMO, è stato cancellato l'hanno scorso.
Sei un appassionato di astronomia o sei un professore? Studi queste cose? Sei informatissimo su ogni missioni, tanto che ricordi nomi, vettori che usano, insomma è un tuo hobby?
scusami per la sfilza di domande
Sei un appassionato di astronomia o sei un professore? Studi queste cose? Sei informatissimo su ogni missioni, tanto che ricordi nomi, vettori che usano, insomma è un tuo hobby?
scusami per la sfilza di domande
no, niente professore.... almeno per adesso... :D
semplicemente appassionato di scienza, esplorazione e tecnica aerospaziale. ;)
AlexGatti
24-01-2006, 09:38
Lo Space Shuttle Discovery arriva, per motivi di configurazione leggermente differente dai "fratelli" a 25 tonnellate (il massimo dello Shuttle) ma a parte che non è un lanciatore espandibile, al massimo ha portato 15 tonnellate, mentre ad esempio il sovietico Buran ne trasportò circa 20 e poteva arrivare a 30.
Tuttavia lo Shuttle finirà la carriera per terminare il più possibile la ISS, non è privista alcuna missione diversa esclusa la Servicing Mission 4 per l'Hubble. Inoltre è troppo costoso oltre che come manutenzione anche come esercizio ed è per questo che dai primi anni '90 non viene più utilizzato per mettere in orbita satelliti.
Il vero punto di forza dello Shuttle è la dimensione ed in particolare la larghezza della payload bay (18 x 4,6 m). E' per questo che gran parte dell'hardware della ISS è trasportato sullo Shuttle ed è anche per questo che è estremamente improbabile che l'hardware già costruito e pronto per essere installato (in particolare gli ultimi array di pannelli solari, i moduli Kibo e Columbus, la Cupola, ecc.) possa essere lanciato con altri sistemi.
Altro motivo per cui è richiesto lo shuttle è l'installazione dei moduli in orbita. Al momento solo lo Shuttle può eseguire questa operazione, è necessario il braccio robotizzato (Canadarm) dell'orbiter e quello della ISS e il solo equipaggio della ISS non potrebbe comunque farlo senza l'aiuto lo Shuttle e il suo equipaggio.
Piuttosto si è deciso concentrare le utlime missioni dello Shuttle per il lancio dell'hardware che richiede esplicitamente l'orbiter americano e trasferire su altri lanciatori, Proton, Ariane, il carico rimanente, in particolare sull'ATV lanciato dall'Ariane 5.
Scusate, posso fare 2 domande stupide, è un po' che le ho in testa ma siccome non sono espertissimo magari posso avere un po' di chiarimenti.
1) Io sapevo che la servicing mission 4 per hubble era stata cancellata perchè da quell'orbita lo space shuttle non avrebbe potuto andare alla iss in caso di danni durante il lancio.
Dunque non si potrebbe organizzare una servicing mission per Hubble usando una soyuz appositamente attrezzata? La soyuz non ha i problemi dello scudo termico che hanno gli shuttle. Perchè non si può fare?
2) Gli shuttle sono destinati ad andare fuori servizio presto. Sono troppo costosi. Ma sono pur sempre i più grandi mezzi che oggi vanno nello spazio. Non si potrebbe attrezzare uno o due shuttle in modo che si possano agganciare alla ISS permanentemente e diventare così dei grossi moduli aggiuntivi per la ISS?
Uno shuttle sarebbe comunque più grande di qualunque modulo previsto per la ISS. Perchè non si può fare o perchè non ha senso farlo?
Frank1962
24-01-2006, 09:49
2) Gli shuttle sono destinati ad andare fuori servizio presto. Sono troppo costosi. Ma sono pur sempre i più grandi mezzi che oggi vanno nello spazio. Non si potrebbe attrezzare uno o due shuttle in modo che si possano agganciare alla ISS permanentemente e diventare così dei grossi moduli aggiuntivi per la ISS?
Uno shuttle sarebbe comunque più grande di qualunque modulo previsto per la ISS. Perchè non si può fare o perchè non ha senso farlo?
per rispondere approssivamente alla seconda domanda credo che forse faranno proprio così per quanto riguarda i vetusti shuttle, anche se forse ci sarebbe il problema che lo shuttle non è progettato per rimanere a tempo indeterminato nello spazio....
AlexGatti
24-01-2006, 09:58
per rispondere approssivamente alla seconda domanda credo che forse faranno proprio così per quanto riguarda i vetusti shuttle, anche se forse ci sarebbe il problema che lo shuttle non è progettato per rimanere a tempo indeterminato nello spazio....
Infatti secondo me lo shuttle andrebbe mandato su già internamente adattato a lunghe permanenze nello spazio e con gli equipaggiamenti aggiuntivi già montati internamente.
Magari uno shuttle con il payload bay chiuso e sigillato in modo da fornire un'ampia sala e un secondo shuttle invece con il payload bay operativo in modo da poter sfruttare il braccio meccanico dello shuttle per successive operazioni... ma sto fantasticando.
Inoltre spero tanto che riescano in qualche modo a salvare Hubble e prolungarne significativamente la vita operativa.
Foto del lancio come immagine del giorno sul sito della NASA, davvero spettacolare:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0601/NHLaunch_cooper_8.jpg
1) Io sapevo che la servicing mission 4 per hubble era stata cancellata perchè da quell'orbita lo space shuttle non avrebbe potuto andare alla iss in caso di danni durante il lancio.
Giusto
Dunque non si potrebbe organizzare una servicing mission per Hubble usando una soyuz appositamente attrezzata? La soyuz non ha i problemi dello scudo termico che hanno gli shuttle. Perchè non si può fare?
Una SM dell'Hubble richiede lo Shuttle con 4 specialisti e soprattutto il braccio Canadarm per agganciarlo all'orbiter.
La missione verrà cmq fatta, a fine carriera. L'ha deciso il nuovo amministratore Griffin, ovviamente solo se non ci saranno più problemi seri.
2) Gli shuttle sono destinati ad andare fuori servizio presto. Sono troppo costosi. Ma sono pur sempre i più grandi mezzi che oggi vanno nello spazio. Non si potrebbe attrezzare uno o due shuttle in modo che si possano agganciare alla ISS permanentemente e diventare così dei grossi moduli aggiuntivi per la ISS?
Proposta assai interessante ma non fattibile per diversi motivi... la manutenzione, poi sulla ISS non esistono due hatch per l'attracco dello shuttle, infine c'è il porblema assai più importante dell'energia. Gli Shuttle sono totalmente indipendenti e l'energia di cui necessitano viene generata da degli APU (Auxiliary Power Units) che generano elettricità con delle celle a combustibile (idrogeno). L'autonomia massima è di circa 14 gg. E' in sviluppo un sistema per trasferire energia tra dalla ISS all'orbiter (verra montato per primo sul Discovery nel 2007), in modo da permettere una più lunga permanenza. In ogni caso la presenza permenente degli shuttle è impossibile anche per molti altri più o meno ovvi motivi, a cominciare dalla massa che creerebbe problemi di drag, incombatibilità con i sistemi elettro-idraulici della stazione, rientro in atmosfera.
per rispondere approssivamente alla seconda domanda credo che forse faranno proprio così per quanto riguarda i vetusti shuttle, anche se forse ci sarebbe il problema che lo shuttle non è progettato per rimanere a tempo indeterminato nello spazio....
No, gli shuttle verrano destinati a fondazioni o musei. O meglio, uno sicuramente rimarrà al KSC, uno andrà allo Smithsonian, il terzo probabilmente in un altro museo.
per rispondere approssivamente alla seconda domanda credo che forse faranno proprio così per quanto riguarda i vetusti shuttle, anche se forse ci sarebbe il problema che lo shuttle non è progettato per rimanere a tempo indeterminato nello spazio....
No, due shuttle verrano destinati a fondazioni o musei (uno sicuramente). O meglio, uno rimarrà al KSC, uno andrà alla Smithsonian Institution, il terzo molto probabilmente sarà semplicemente usato come fonte di pezzi di ricambio per gli altri due (la sorte purtroppo toccherà al pià giovane, l'Endeavour, per motivi di ciclo di manutenzione).
Frank1962
24-01-2006, 13:06
vabbè ma la domanda allora sorge spontanea ....al posto degli shuttle che ci metteranno? ..lo hanno già deciso?
Parlano tanto di pensionamento degli shuttle e di come sono ormai obsoleti e dei sostituti abbiano solo qualche immagine 3d che sembra presa quasi da odissea nello spazio :D
vabbè ma la domanda allora sorge spontanea ....al posto degli shuttle che ci metteranno? ..lo hanno già deciso?
Parlano tanto di pensionamento degli shuttle e di come sono ormai obsoleti e dei sostituti abbiano solo qualche immagine 3d che sembra presa quasi da odissea nello spazio :D
certo che ce l'hanno che discorsi... cmq c'è una discussione aperta sull'argomento (CEV) lo trovi nella lista in alto.
Attualmente è in fase di sviluppo e il primo test è previsto nel 2011.
Frank1962
24-01-2006, 14:24
certo che ce l'hanno che discorsi... cmq c'è una discussione aperta sull'argomento (CEV) lo trovi nella lista in alto.
where?
where?
seconda discussione importante della sezione Scienza e Tecnica.
Frank1962
24-01-2006, 14:45
qua (http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/showthread.php?t=851766) non vedo nessuna discussione sul cev ...cmq ho guardato su wikipedia e devo dire che non si può certo affermare che la nasa stia progettando un "sostituto" dello shuttle, a me sinceramente sembra un bel passo indietro questo "cev" ....l'idea e molto similari ad apollo/saturn di una 50ina di anni fa :rolleyes:
qua (http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/showthread.php?t=851766) non vedo nessuna discussione sul cev ...cmq ho guardato su wikipedia e devo dire che non si può certo affermare che la nasa stia progettando un "sostituto" dello shuttle, a me sinceramente sembra un bel passo indietro questo "cev" ....l'idea e molto similari ad apollo/saturn di una 50ina di anni fa :rolleyes:
http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/showthread.php?t=1020181
penso che in molti avremo nostalgia degli Space Shuttles, purtoppo pero' dovremo accettare il fatto che non e' conveniente modificare un simile orbiter per portarlo sull'orbita lunare..
@GioFX
mi sbaglio io o l'atlas utilizzato per lanciare la sonda New Horizon era in una delle configurazioni piu' "pompate" pur essendo a tutti gli effetti la sonda piccola e leggera? (rispetto ad una cassini per esempio..)
Se fosse cosi', e' stato pensato per avere la massima velocita' di fuga dall'orbita terrestre ed arrivare in tempi accettabili ai margini del sistema solare?
Tnx
Ciao
..giusto per fare un paragone:
New Horizon lanciato il 19/01/06 raggiungera' l'orbita di marte 8/04/06
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter lanciato 12/08/05 raggiungera' marte il 10/03/06
Il bello che sono stati lanciati entrambi con un vettore Atlas V ;)
duchetto
25-01-2006, 16:46
..giusto per fare un paragone:
New Horizon lanciato il 19/01/06 raggiungera' l'orbita di marte 8/04/06
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter lanciato 12/08/05 raggiungera' marte il 10/03/06
Il bello che sono stati lanciati entrambi con un vettore Atlas V ;)
vabbè ma la traiettoria è completamente diversa e NH non si deve inserire in orbita marziana
http://mars1.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/realtime/mro1.jpg
qua (http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/showthread.php?t=851766) non vedo nessuna discussione sul cev ...cmq ho guardato su wikipedia e devo dire che non si può certo affermare che la nasa stia progettando un "sostituto" dello shuttle, a me sinceramente sembra un bel passo indietro questo "cev" ....l'idea e molto similari ad apollo/saturn di una 50ina di anni fa :rolleyes:
Ma!!!!!!
INDICE DELLE DISCUSSIONI SULLO SPAZIO:
http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/showthread.php?t=851766
Discussione sul CEV:
http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/showthread.php?p=9551606
E' progettato per andare in orbita bassa (LEO), oltre che sulla Luna e Marte, quindi E' il sostituto dello space shuttle. O meglio, il programma ESAS sostituisce il programma STS.
http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/showthread.php?t=1020181
penso che in molti avremo nostalgia degli Space Shuttles, purtoppo pero' dovremo accettare il fatto che non e' conveniente modificare un simile orbiter per portarlo sull'orbita lunare..
Vero, però purtroppo non è solo non conveniente, è proprio quasi impossibile per una serie di pressochè ovvie ragioni.
mi sbaglio io o l'atlas utilizzato per lanciare la sonda New Horizon era in una delle configurazioni piu' "pompate" pur essendo a tutti gli effetti la sonda piccola e leggera? (rispetto ad una cassini per esempio..)
Se fosse cosi', e' stato pensato per avere la massima velocita' di fuga dall'orbita terrestre ed arrivare in tempi accettabili ai margini del sistema solare?
Esatto... l'Atlas utilizzato è un 551, una delle versioni sulla carta più potenti e la più potente mai lanciata. E' stato deciso di rischiare lanciando per la prima volta in questa versione per poter ottenere la massima velocità di uscita dall'orbita terrestre, utilizzando appunto 5 boosters solidi.
vabbè ma la traiettoria è completamente diversa e NH non si deve inserire in orbita marziana
Certo :oink:
L'MRO dovra' anche effettuare una sequenza di "aerobraking" prima di entrare nell'orbita definitiva..
la mia era solo una semplice considerazione sulle diverse velocita' di crociera delle due sonde :)
la cosa che mi ha lasciato perplesso del vettore Atlas era la distribuzione dei boosters.
Se la vista non mi ha ingannato erano disposti 3 da un lato e 2 dall'altro; e, non come ci si potrebbe aspettare disposti uniformemente lungo la circonferenza esterna del corpo princiapale (a 72° l'uno dall'altro).
Come compensano questo sbilanciamento nella spinta?
la cosa che mi ha lasciato perplesso del vettore Atlas era la distribuzione dei boosters.
Se la vista non mi ha ingannato erano disposti 3 da un lato e 2 dall'altro; e, non come ci si potrebbe aspettare disposti uniformemente lungo la circonferenza esterna del corpo princiapale (a 72° l'uno dall'altro).
Come compensano questo sbilanciamento nella spinta?
Non cambia molto... la forza generata dai booster è distribuita sul corpo centrale del lanciatore, dato che i nozzle sono inclinati di 30 gradi verso di esso. Per controllare la distribuzione della spinta si utilizzano pressioni differenti dei gas giocando sulla geomtria della camera di combustione e quindi sulla loro velocità di espulsione. Il motore centrale (il russo RD-180) stabilizza la direzionalità del lanciatore annullando le forze che tendono a sponstarne la rotta.
Un breve video direttamente dal sito della ILS illustra meglio il concetto:
http://www.ilslaunch.com/launches/cbin/Movies/atlas/QuickTime/LaunchFinal.mov
duchetto
03-02-2006, 14:43
mi chiedo se già hanno degli obiettivi nella fascia di Kuiper da studiare, o se la NH oltrepassato Plutone scruterà all'impazzata nel vuoto per trovare qualcosa di interessante :confused:
mi chiedo se già hanno degli obiettivi nella fascia di Kuiper da studiare, o se la NH oltrepassato Plutone scruterà all'impazzata nel vuoto per trovare qualcosa di interessante :confused:
Questo (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/mission_timeline.html) link dovrebbe rispondere alla tua curiosità...
VegetaSSJ5
04-02-2006, 20:56
http://www.magicalears.com/clipart/Classic%20Characters/Pluto/pluto-01.gif
duchetto
05-02-2006, 00:54
Questo (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/mission_timeline.html) link dovrebbe rispondere alla tua curiosità...
un paio di obbiettivi quindi :stordita:
duchetto
02-06-2006, 23:14
New Horizons Crosses The Asteroid Belt
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/New_Horizons_Crosses_The_Asteroid_Belt.html
credo che questa sia una della discussioni piu' a lungo termine di questo forum
GioFX, sarai sempre tu a testimoniare l evento tra 9 anni e mezzo? :)
GioFX, sarai sempre tu a testimoniare l evento tra 9 anni e mezzo? :)
sicuro!
September 1, 2006
Pluto-Bound Camera Sees 'First Light'
New Horizons Payload Fully Operational as Telescopic Imager Glimpses Star Cluster
The highest-resolution camera on NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft is seeing stars, and mission scientists and engineers couldn't be more excited.
This week the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) opened its protective cover and took its first image in space, of Messier 7, a star cluster in our Milky Way galaxy. The electronic snapshot also meant that all seven New Horizons science instruments have now operated in space and returned good data since the spacecraft launched in January 2006.
il resto dell'articolo:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/090106.html
e ora non resta che aspettare le foto di Giove.. ;)
continuano le polmiche sulla definizione di "pianeta" data dall'IAU (International Astronomical Union):
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/piPerspective_current.php
New Horizons Continuing on to Pluto, Planet or Not
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/141078main_liftoff3.jpg
Image above: Liftoff of the Atlas V carrying NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to a distant date with Pluto! Image credit: NASA/KSC
Poor New Horizons. When it launched in January 2006 it was with all the prestige of the first spacecraft to study Pluto, the last unvisited planet in the solar system. That changed seven months later, when astronomers decided that Pluto was not a planet. For the time being, New Horizons is at least the first mission to a dwarf planet -- the new class of objects into which scientists dumped Pluto. But that doesn't mean it will be the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet. Under the new definition (it's still unclear), Ceres may be upgraded from asteroid to dwarf planet, and if NASA's Dawn mission launches as planned next summer, it will arrive at Ceres in February 2015, five months before New Horizons gets to Pluto.
In the meantime, New Horizons' mission remains the same: to unlock one of the solar system's last, great secrets. The spacecraft will cross the orbits of all the planets from Earth to Neptune and fly by Pluto and Charon in July 2015. Charon had been generally regarded as Pluto's moon, but the new definition of planet may change its status as well. Apparently, not even the astronomers are entirely sure. Regardless, the seven science instruments on the piano-sized New Horizons probe will shed light on the bodies' surface properties, geology, interior makeup and atmospheres.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html
Incontro con Giove e gravity assist
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/images/mainPage/featuredImage/021307_JKdk3.jpg
mancano 13 giorni all'incontro con Giove che si preannuncia "il" vero banco di prova per la sonda e il team di gestione (Operations e Science)
Jupiter Press Kit:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/common/content/pdfs/011607_JupiterPressKit.pdf
Trailer della missione:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/videos/NHJupiterTrailer/NHJupiterTrailer640x480.mp4
Jupiter Flyby Trajectory
Jupiter Encounter
The larger image shows New Horizons' path through the Jupiter system; the inset shows the location of Jupiter's four largest moons, Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto. New Horizons will turn its science instruments toward the moons as well as the giant planet.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/whereisnh/jupiterflyby/nhjf20070201_0329.jpghttp://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh_jupiter.php
duchetto
14-02-2007, 18:24
speriamo in qualche bella foto dei satelliti medicei..
meno sette!
link al filmato esplicativo:
http://www.nasa.gov/mov/167376main_ApproachingJupiter.mov
Tutti gli occhi sono puntati sul Grande Giove:
Campaigning for Jupiter
February 22, 2007
We're now inside of a week to Jupiter closest approach! One aspect of our flyby that I have not yet noted is the broad campaign of coordinated Jupiter observations taking place on Earth and in space. As New Horizons approaches Jupiter, telescopes on terra firma, in Earth orbit and even far across the solar system are turning to observe the "big picture" while New Horizons provides the fine details.
Prominent examples of telescopes enlisted to this cause include a wide variety of amateur telescopes, NASA's large Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) and huge Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, as well as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) and the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellites operating in Earth orbit. Over the next two weeks, these various facilities will intensively image and obtain spectroscopy of Jupiter's atmosphere and aurora, Jupiter's moon Io, and of the Io plasma torus — the donut-shaped ring of plasma that rotates with the moon around Jupiter.
Additionally, the Alice ultraviolet spectrometer on the European Space Agency's Rosetta comet-orbiter mission will be observing the Io plasma torus from its ringside seat near Mars beginning next week. (Rosetta flies by Mars on February 25 for a gravity assist of its own).
Rosetta's Alice, a sister of the Alice ultraviolet spectrometer on New Horizons, will monitor the Io plasma torus and Jovian aurora emission during March and April as New Horizons flies down Jupiter's magnetotail. Why? The Alice instrument aboard New Horizons can't do this because it would involve looking almost directly back into the Sun, but the Rosetta Alice instrument can achieve the same thing since Jupiter is deep in the night sky as seen from Mars. Pretty sweet, huh?
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/images/022207_Hubble_tn.jpg
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/images/022207_IRTF_tn.jpg
The Hubble Space Telescope (top) and Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii (below) are among the many observatories on Earth and in space watching Jupiter during the New Horizons encounter. Image Credits: NASA, STScI, Institute for Astronomy, U of Hawaii
As we gear up for the onslaught of observations New Horizons will make, my team at New Horizons thanks all of the ground-based and space-based observing teams, whose important supporting observations strengthen and deepen the value of our Jupiter flyby.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/piPerspective_current.php
speriamo in qualche bella foto dei satelliti medicei..
direi che, tutti insieme, di materiale dovrebbero raccoglierne!
:D
duchetto
27-02-2007, 18:56
ecco IO :cool:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/data/jupiter/level2/lor/jpeg/003478/lor_0034785119_0x630_sci_1.jpg
mancancano meno di 11 ore al closest approach
adesso la velocità di NH è di 22,21 Km/s
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/whereisnh/jupiterflyby/nhjf20070201_0643.jpg
E Anche Giove e' passato..
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/images/JupiterFlyby_logo.jpg
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/whereisnh/jupiterflyby_sm/nhjf2007_0099_sm.jpg
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/large/022807_3.jpg
The little Red Spot
Le immagini raccolte dal New Horizons Science Operations Center:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/:read:
altre fonti:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0702/27jupiterflyby/
duchetto
28-02-2007, 12:15
Europa
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/large/022807_2.jpg
e Ganimede
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/large/022807_1.jpg
:cool:
E ora... un po' di pazienza! :D
mi togliete una curiosita'?... anzi 2
1. perche i sensori delle sonde sono sempre in bianco e nero per poi digitalizzare il colore successivamente all'arrivo sulla terra??
2. da adesso fino al 2015 la sonda rimarra' inattiva senza piu' mandare foto,oppure si avvicinera' a qualche altro corpo celeste?
mi togliete una curiosita'?... anzi 2
1. perche i sensori delle sonde sono sempre in bianco e nero per poi digitalizzare il colore successivamente all'arrivo sulla terra??
2. da adesso fino al 2015 la sonda rimarra' inattiva senza piu' mandare foto,oppure si avvicinera' a qualche altro corpo celeste?
Per la prima non saprei, ma c'era stata una discussione piuttosto accesa su questo argomento in un altro thread della sezione un po' di tempo fa: per la prima invece penso che abbia ragione tu, stando a quanto dice qui (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/mission_timeline.html).
mi togliete una curiosita'?... anzi 2
1. perche i sensori delle sonde sono sempre in bianco e nero per poi digitalizzare il colore successivamente all'arrivo sulla terra??
2. da adesso fino al 2015 la sonda rimarrà inattiva senza più mandare foto,oppure si avvicinerà a qualche altro corpo celeste?anch'io passo la prima domanda in quanto non sono così esperto in tecnologia CCD (in particolare nelle varie frequenze oltre lo spettro del visibile IR/UV)
Per quanto concerne la tua seconda domanda, il piano di volo non prevede altri incontri fino al 2015 al momento dell'incontro con Plutone.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/common/content/artistConcepts/large/10Years_lg.jpg
Qui (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/common/content/posters/NHHopkinsPoster_posterSize.tif) la versione HI-res
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/mission_timeline.html
I sistemi/sensori della sonda verranno tra breve messi a riposo e "svegliati" una volta l'anno per eseguire diagnostiche. Le comunicazioni si limiteranno a dei semplici "beacon-beeps" (mi pare li avessero definiti così) trasmessi dalla sonda una volta al mese come indicazione sullo stato dei sistemi principali.
son curioso di sapere che frequenze usa la sonda per mandare i dati, e quanto impiegano per arrivare sulla terra da quella distanza... :)
però che avventura sta sonda :cool:
duchetto
28-02-2007, 23:32
Most of the data being gathered by the spacecraft are stored onboard and will be downlinked to Earth during March and April 2007.
:cool:
son curioso di sapere che frequenze usa la sonda per mandare i dati, e quanto impiegano per arrivare sulla terra da quella distanza... :)
però che avventura sta sonda :cool:
da Wikipedia (giusto perche' e' in italiano ;) ):
Sonda e sottosistemi
La sonda ha la forma di un triangolo con un RTG cilindrico che sporge da un lato del triangolo e un'antenna parabolica da 2.5 metri posizionata sul triangolo. La sonda comunicherà utilizzando la banda X e da Plutone potrà trasmettere 768 bit/s mentre da Giove trasmetterà a 38 Kbit/s. I segnali verranno ricevuti dal Deep Space Network. L'RTG fornirà i 190 Wat previsti fino al 2015 come minimo. Come propellente viene utilizzata l'idrazina che alimenta un motore tipo delta V in grado di fornire 290 m/s dopo il lancio. La sonda è dotata di stabilizzatori lungo i tre assi e lungo le tre possibili rotazioni. Le fotocamere sono montate su un lato della sonda. La sonda includerà 465 kg di combustibile se il volo passerà da Giove e 445 se il volo sarà diretto. Questo vorrebbe dire minor combustibile per il volo nella fascia di Kuiper.
La sonda ha sette strumenti. Il Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) una fotocamera digitale ad alta risoluzione nel campo del visibile. Il Pluto Exploration Remote Sensing Investigation (PERSI) consistente in due strumenti, Ralph telescopio con diverse lunghezze d'onda analizzabili, un CCD per le lunghezze d'onda visibili (MVIC), uno spettroscopio per l'infrarosso (LEISA) e uno spettroscopio per l'ultravioletto (Alice). Le particelle ad alta energia sono analizzate dallo strumento (PAM) consistente in SWAP un analizzatore toroidale elettrostatico e PEPSSI un misuratore della vita di volo degli ioni e sensore di elettroni. Il Radio Science Experiment (REX) utilizza un oscillatore molto stabile per effettuare analisi radio sul pianeta nano. Lo student-built dust counter (SDC) è un misuratore di polvere solare installato a bordo della sonda.
Il costo totale previsto della missione è di 650 milioni di dollari. Il preventivo include anche la gestione a terra della sonda. La sonda rimpiazza la missione cancellata Pluto Kuiper Express.
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/spacecraft/images/dish2.jpg
sul sito ufficiale dell'APL:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/spacecraft/commEarth.html:read:
duchetto
12-03-2007, 20:40
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/large/030907MeanRing_lg.jpg
The New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) snapped this photo of Jupiter's ring system on February 24, 2007, from a distance of 7.1 million kilometers (4.4 million miles).
This processed image shows a narrow ring, about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) wide, with a fainter sheet of material inside it. "This is one of the clearest pictures ever taken of Jupiter's faint ring system," says Dr. Mark Showalter, a planetary astronomer from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who planned many of the ring images. "The ring looks different from what we expected — it has usually appeared much wider."
Showalter suggests that the ring's largest boulders are corralled into a narrow belt by the influence of Jupiter's two innermost moons, Adrastea and Metis. The ring also appears to darken in the middle, a possible hint that a smaller, undiscovered moon is clearing out a gap. "If there is a smaller moon within those rings, we hope to see it in some of the hundreds of additional images that New Horizons will transmit back to Earth over the next several weeks," says Dr. Andy Cheng, LORRI principal investigator from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/030907.html
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/large/030907MeanRing_lg.jpg
The New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) snapped this photo of Jupiter's ring system on February 24, 2007, from a distance of 7.1 million kilometers (4.4 million miles).
This processed image shows a narrow ring, about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) wide, with a fainter sheet of material inside it. "This is one of the clearest pictures ever taken of Jupiter's faint ring system," says Dr. Mark Showalter, a planetary astronomer from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who planned many of the ring images. "The ring looks different from what we expected — it has usually appeared much wider."
Showalter suggests that the ring's largest boulders are corralled into a narrow belt by the influence of Jupiter's two innermost moons, Adrastea and Metis. The ring also appears to darken in the middle, a possible hint that a smaller, undiscovered moon is clearing out a gap. "If there is a smaller moon within those rings, we hope to see it in some of the hundreds of additional images that New Horizons will transmit back to Earth over the next several weeks," says Dr. Andy Cheng, LORRI principal investigator from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/pages/030907.html
non avevo neanche idea che Giove avesse anelli (le mie conoscenze di astronomia sono decisamente scarse :doh: )
Molte immagini raccolte da New Horizon sono state pubblicate nelle scorse settimane. Per la sonda e' ora il momento del riposo :zzz:
IO
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/large/050107/050107_04.jpg
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/large/050107/050107_07.jpg
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/large/050107/050107_08.jpg
GANYMEDE
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/large/050107/050107_06.jpg
Infine l'occhio di Zeus (quello piccolo :) )
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/images/large/050107/050107_11.jpg
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos.html
June 28, 2007
New Horizons Slips into Electronic Slumber
New Horizons’ first operational hibernation phase is off to a successful start! On commands transmitted from the Mission Operations Center at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland, through NASA’s Deep Space Network, the spacecraft eased into hibernation mode in the early hours of June 27. Since then, New Horizons has twice broadcast “green” beacon tones back to Earth, indicating all systems are healthy and operating as programmed.
Hibernation – in which the spacecraft’s redundant components and guidance and control system are powered off – is designed to reduce wear and tear on spacecraft electronics, lessen spacecraft-operation costs and free up Deep Space Network tracking resources for other missions. New Horizons will “sleep” in this spin-stabilized state for most of the remaining 8-year cruise to Pluto; operators will wake New Horizons for about two months out of each year for system checkouts and instrument calibrations.
During hibernation, New Horizons’ onboard flight computer monitors system health and broadcasts a beacon tone through the medium-gain antenna. New Horizons will transmit a “green” coded tone if all is well, or a “red” tone if it detects a problem and requires help from the operations team. New Horizons is the first mission to make operational use of hibernation in flight and the associated beacon communications mode.
"We're looking forward to an uneventful spacecraft slumber," says New Horizons Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, of APL. She adds that to be sure everything is nominal, the team will check in on New Horizons seven times during this hibernation period, which lasts two weeks.
il link originale
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/062807.htm
e l'articolo precedente, che spiega un po' meglio:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/062807.htm
New Horizons e' ora a 7 UA
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/images/070108_launch.jpg
New Horizons launched just over 18 months
ago on a 114-month journey to the Pluto system.
(NASA photo)
e prosegue il suo cammino "fiondato" ad una velocita' di 0.3 UA/mese (unita' astronomiche al mese)
Marilson
23-08-2007, 10:23
New Horizons e' ora a 7 UA
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/images/070108_launch.jpg
New Horizons launched just over 18 months
ago on a 114-month journey to the Pluto system.
(NASA photo)
e prosegue il suo cammino "fiondato" ad una velocita' di 0.3 UA/mese (unita' astronomiche al mese)
70000 km/h :eek:
Marilson
23-08-2007, 10:31
se l'apollo avesse viaggiato alla stessa velocità media avrebbe raggiunto la luna in 4 ore e mezzo anzichè in 3 giorni :sofico:
se l'apollo avesse viaggiato alla stessa velocità media avrebbe raggiunto la luna in 4 ore e mezzo anzichè in 3 giorni :sofico:
gia' il problema sarebbe poi stato fermarlo!!! :ciapet:
Marilson
23-08-2007, 13:27
gia' il problema sarebbe poi stato fermarlo!!! :ciapet:
eheh la gravità della luna + i retrorazzi nn sarebbero bastati mi sa :D
in questa missione è per caso previsto anche di analizzare l'attrazione gravitazionale a grande distanza dal sole per scoprire l'eventuale presenza di materia oscura?
in questa missione è per caso previsto anche di analizzare l'attrazione gravitazionale a grande distanza dal sole per scoprire l'eventuale presenza di materia oscura?
Credo di no, ad una rapida occhiata non mi sembra che la sonda trasporti strumenti adatti a questo compito. Ma potrei sbagliarmi.
Credo di no, ad una rapida occhiata non mi sembra che la sonda trasporti strumenti adatti a questo compito. Ma potrei sbagliarmi.
anche a me pare di no.
E' possibile pero' che incrocino i dati rilevati dalla sonda con quelli rilevati a terra o dai telescopi orbitanti come il Chandra per rilevare simili fenomeni.
Marilson
24-08-2007, 13:30
ma gli effetti della materia oscura sarebbero registrabili in quelle zone dell'universo a bassissima (presunta) densità di materia... la distanza plutone-sole è un inezia in confronto alla scala su cui agisce la materia oscura..
in pratica con una di quelle sonde lanciate decenni fa che ora son uscite dal sistema solare.. con le poche informazioni che si ricevono hanno notato che la sonda nn si trova dove dovrebbe stare in base alla decelerazione causata dalla massa del sole che la attrae e rallenta.. quindi la soluzione sarebbe che esiste massa invisibile.. la materia oscura.. che forma un alone distribuito nel nostro sistema solare.
allora ipotizzavo che sta sonda possa far ste misurazioni in modo da capire se la decelerazione in allontamento dal sole è corretta rispetto a quello che sarebbe dovuto alle masse presenti nel sistma solare.
in pratica con una di quelle sonde lanciate decenni fa che ora son uscite dal sistema solare.. con le poche informazioni che si ricevono hanno notato che la sonda nn si trova dove dovrebbe stare in base alla decelerazione causata dalla massa del sole che la attrae e rallenta.. quindi la soluzione sarebbe che esiste massa invisibile.. la materia oscura.. che forma un alone distribuito nel nostro sistema solare.
allora ipotizzavo che sta sonda possa far ste misurazioni in modo da capire se la decelerazione in allontamento dal sole è corretta rispetto a quello che sarebbe dovuto alle masse presenti nel sistma solare.
ora vado a riguardarmi i siti delle missioni Voyager e Pioneer ;)
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/pioneer/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/history/pioneer.html
albertoz85
24-08-2007, 22:38
in pratica con una di quelle sonde lanciate decenni fa che ora son uscite dal sistema solare.. con le poche informazioni che si ricevono hanno notato che la sonda nn si trova dove dovrebbe stare in base alla decelerazione causata dalla massa del sole che la attrae e rallenta.. quindi la soluzione sarebbe che esiste massa invisibile.. la materia oscura.. che forma un alone distribuito nel nostro sistema solare.
allora ipotizzavo che sta sonda possa far ste misurazioni in modo da capire se la decelerazione in allontamento dal sole è corretta rispetto a quello che sarebbe dovuto alle masse presenti nel sistma solare.
Il rallentamento non era dovuto alla materia oscura ma all'attraversamento dell'onda d'urto provocata dal termine dell'eliopausa in cui le particelle da supersoniche ritornano a velocità subsoniche, oltre quel confine l'influenza del Sole è terminata perchè il vento solare è "sopraffatto" da quello interstellare, e si può considerare il confine del Sistema Solare, che è stato rilevato nel 2003 per la Voyager 1. La materia oscura non c'entra nulla e non è rilevabile a distanza così ridotte, per questo su New Horizons non è installato nessuno strumento per rilevazioni di questo tipo.
Marilson
25-08-2007, 10:16
La materia oscura non c'entra nulla e non è rilevabile a distanza così ridotte, per questo su New Horizons non è installato nessuno strumento per rilevazioni di questo tipo.
quello che ho detto io prima ;)
Il rallentamento non era dovuto alla materia oscura ma all'attraversamento dell'onda d'urto provocata dal termine dell'eliopausa in cui le particelle da supersoniche ritornano a velocità subsoniche,
Scusa ma qual'è la velocità del suono nello spazio? Ipotizzo sia lentissima?
fabrylama
09-01-2008, 12:24
Scusa ma qual'è la velocità del suono nello spazio? Ipotizzo sia lentissima?
tutt'altro, è velocissima... wiki dice 100 km/s.
killercode
09-01-2008, 13:04
Scusate, ma non c'è suono nello spazio, non c'è atmosfera
albertoz85
09-01-2008, 13:13
Scusate, ma non c'è suono nello spazio, non c'è atmosfera
Si ma il vento solare e il mezzo interstellare esistono, ed essendo fatti di particelle materiali il suono è trasmissibile e ha una velocità...
fabrylama
09-01-2008, 13:55
Scusate, ma non c'è suono nello spazio, non c'è atmosfera
il suono non si trasmette nel vuoto... ma nello spazio interplanetario non c'è il vuoto
killercode
09-01-2008, 14:42
il suono non si trasmette nel vuoto... ma nello spazio interplanetario non c'è il vuoto
Ah...non c'è il vuoto? :wtf: ne ero sicuro, grazie per la correzione
fabrylama
09-01-2008, 14:56
Ah...non c'è il vuoto? :wtf: ne ero sicuro, grazie per la correzione
beh il vuoto... diciamo che è un concetto relativo, di certo lo spazio interplanetario è più "vuoto" dell'atmosfera, e lo spazio interstellare è più vuoto dello spazio interplanetario, ma comunque qualche particella quì e la c'è sempre, di certo il suono "non si propaga" nemmeno nel vuoto interplanetario... non si propaga nel senso che l'intensità decresce troppo rapidamente affinchè sia possibile rilevarla anche a breve distanza, ma comunque si può definire una velocità del suono, considerando il libero cammino medio fra due particelle, e questa non è una mera considerazione teorica proprio perchè influisce sulla velocità di propagazione delle particelle del vento solare
New Horizons Crosses 9 AU
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/images/20080221_lg.jpg
New Horizons passed a planetary milepost today at 5 a.m. EST when it reached a distance of 9 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun – about 836.6 million miles, or nine times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. “The spacecraft destined for the ninth planet is now just beyond 9 AU and continuing outbound for the solar system’s frontier at more than 60,000 kilometers per hour!” says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of NASA Headquarters.
New Horizons has covered nearly 970.5 million miles (1.56 billion kilometers) since its launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on January 19, 2006. Speeding toward Pluto at about 42,000 miles (67,500 kilometers) per hour, New Horizons will zip past the orbit of Saturn – where the Cassini spacecraft now operates – on June 8. That crossing will make New Horizons the farthest spacecraft on its way to or at its primary target.
New Horizons itself won’t have long to enjoy this latest accomplishment, though, as mission operators will put the spacecraft into regularly scheduled hibernation this afternoon at 3:50 p.m. EST.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/022108.htm
sta viaggiando ad un equivalente di MACH 67 :eek:
ma sbaglio o corre piu' del previsto?
ma sbaglio o corre piu' del previsto?
Effettivamente non e' sempre molto chiaro...
Nell'immagine che ho riportato e' specificata la velocita' di allontanamento dal sole pari a 18.8 Km/s (~ 68000 Km/h).
La velocita' relativa alla quale incrociera' Plutone, stando a quanto affermano qui (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/missionFAQs.php#aroundPluto), sara' invece di 43000 Km/h.
Qui puoi trovare qualche altra info su come misurano la velocita':
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php
ma sbaglio o corre piu' del previsto?
Un'altra anomalia! :eek:
Si fa per dire, magari questa volta è un "banale" errore di calcolo... :)
600 miglia in 5 minuti.
Ringrazia i booster RD-180 russi, quanto di meglio il mercato offra.
Marilson
03-06-2008, 21:28
scusate un attimo, ma per velocità di crociera intendiamo a motori spenti vero? La spinta viene data inizialmente dai booster, poi eventualmente correzioni serve ed effetto fionda sfruttando l'attrazione gravitazionale con i pianeti incontrati. Il resto lo fa l'inerzia e l'assenza di attrito apprezzabile, mi sbaglio? tipo voyager per intenderci.. (non il programma :sofico: )
scusate un attimo, ma per velocità di crociera intendiamo a motori spenti vero? La spinta viene data inizialmente dai booster, poi eventualmente correzioni serve ed effetto fionda sfruttando l'attrazione gravitazionale con i pianeti incontrati. Il resto lo fa l'inerzia e l'assenza di attrito apprezzabile, mi sbaglio? tipo voyager per intenderci.. (non il programma :sofico: )
Ovviamente va avanti per inerzia! Non imbarcano carburante a sufficienza per mantenere i motori accesi! :eek:
Inoltre con i motori accesi sarebbe in continua accelerazione (e quindi non potremmo piu' parlare di velocita' di crociera)
I motori a ioni possono essere mantenuti accesi piu' a lungo in quanto il consumo del propellente e' molto piu' ridotto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_propulsion_engine
Marilson
05-06-2008, 14:14
Ovviamente va avanti per inerzia! Non imbarcano carburante a sufficienza per mantenere i motori accesi! :eek:
Inoltre con i motori accesi sarebbe in continua accelerazione (e quindi non potremmo piu' parlare di velocita' di crociera)
I motori a ioni possono essere mantenuti accesi piu' a lungo in quanto il consumo del propellente e' molto piu' ridotto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_propulsion_engine
ottimo meno male che avevo capito bene :asd:, e cosa ne è stato invece di quei progetti che intendevano sfruttare come propulsione il vento solare con apposite vele?
ottimo meno male che avevo capito bene :asd:, e cosa ne è stato invece di quei progetti che intendevano sfruttare come propulsione il vento solare con apposite vele?
ne avevo sentito parlare anch'io (se solo mi ricordassi dove..non so se fosse Ulisse o Focus :O ) ma non saprei dire altro, se non che mi ricorda una puntata di Deep Space 9 :D
Oltrepassata qualche giorno fa anche l'orbita di Saturno.
La prossima sara' l'orbita di Urano nel 2011 !
June 8, 2008
New Horizons Ventures Beyond Saturn’s Orbit
New Horizons crossed the orbit of Saturn on June 8, passing yet another interplanetary milepost on its voyage to Pluto and the icy environs of the Kuiper Belt.
Spinning in healthy, electronic hibernation, New Horizons reached a distance of 10.06 astronomical units (about 935 million miles or 1.5 billion kilometers) from the Sun at 10:00 universal time, becoming the first spacecraft to journey beyond Saturn’s orbit since Voyager 2 passed the ringed planet nearly 27 years ago. In fact, Voyager 1 and 2, at the edge of the Sun’s heliosphere some 100 AU away, are the only spacecraft operating farther out than New Horizons.
New Horizons reached Saturn's distance just two years and four months after launch - by far a faster transit to Saturn than any previous spacecraft. (Voyager 1, the previous record holder, made the trip in approximately three years and two months.)
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/pictures/060808_NHpassSaturn.jpg
New Horizons has crossed the orbits of three planets since its launch in January 2006, though only one – Jupiter, in February 2007 – was close enough for a gravity boost and for the spacecraft to study. Saturn is more than 1.4 billion miles (2.3 billion kilometers) from New Horizons at present.
After a productive two-week series of system checks, maintenance activities, and software and command uploads,the spacecraft is humming through the outer solar system at 40,850 miles (65,740 kilometers) per hour. The New Horizons team expects to keep the spacecraft in hibernation until Sept. 2.
Next checkpoint on New Horizons' journey is the orbit of Uranus, which it crosses on March 18, 2011. Follow the spacecraft to Pluto and beyond.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/060808.htm
Io voglio gli aggiornamenti di GioFX fino al 2020 :read: :asd:
Passato recentemente il 1000esimo giorno di "volo" (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspective.php) di New Horizons:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/images/20081006_01_lg.jpg
New Horizons è ora la quinta sonda che è "andata più lontana", dopo Voyager 1 e 2 e Pioneer 10 e 11:
It’s hard to believe, but Oct. 15 will be the 1,000th day of flight for New Horizons. And in that time we’ve traveled so far that only four other spacecraft – Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 – have ventured farther. Can you believe it’s been this long? Sometimes it seems so, but other times, it seems like we just blasted off from Florida on that cool afternoon of Jan. 19, 2006.
La sonda ha ricevuto un upgrade del software che ne ha migliorato le capacità, corretto alcuni bug e in generale rende pronta la sonda al flyby di Plutone:
Over the past five weeks, as our spacecraft hurtled on through the wild black yonder beyond Saturn, New Horizons received major upgrades to all three of its software systems: Command and Data Handling (called C&DH), Guidance and Control (G&C), and Autonomy, which is our fault detection and correction software “autopilot.” These upgrades were radioed up to the spacecraft to fix various minor (and two pretty major) bugs discovered since launch, add some new capabilities, protect the three codes against certain fault conditions and put us in position to conduct the Pluto system encounter. In fact, for both C&DH and G&C, encounter versions of the software are on board. We still need to add a few autonomy upgrades, but we are now executing well over 95 percent of the encounter code capabilities.
Planning for these upgrades began after the Jupiter flyby. First we identified dozens of code fixes and enhancements that we wanted to make; we then modified the existing code to their new versions, which in turn was followed by months of ground-based testing of the new software packages. The process culminated with the three uploads in September, which went as smoothly as anyone could have dreamed – a testament to the care that our mission operations team put into these delicate “brain transplants.” And since the new codes were started, everything has worked as advertised – which is a testament to the hard work and talent of the New Horizons engineers who designed and tested the codes over the past year.
The PI's Perspective
Welcome to Mid-Cruise!
January 5, 2009
As the new year takes root, the New Horizons team is about to celebrate the third anniversary of our launch on January 19, 2006.
If you’ve been following our progress on Twitter or just reading posts on our Web site, then you know our spacecraft has covered well over one-third of the distance to Pluto in those three years, putting it now almost half a billion kilometers beyond Saturn. You might also know that since I last wrote here, we’ve completed our 2008 spacecraft and payload checkout, recalibrated our seven scientific instruments, and refined our trajectory knowledge accuracy. We’ve even had a chance to collect cruise science data on the deep-space plasma and dust environment, as well as some scientifically unique imagery to yield photometric phase curves of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
Since December 16, when we concluded our 3.5-month active period for 2008, our baby has been hibernating again. New Horizons will remain in this low-activity hibernation state until mid-summer, when we’ll roust her for another annual checkout.
DSN antenna
NASA’s 70-meter-wide Deep Space Network (DSN) antenna, “the big ear,” in Canberra, Australia. This antenna maintains one of the three main DSN radio links to New Horizons during cruise. It will also be the primary transmit and receive antenna at our closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015. New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern visited the Canberra DSN station in mid-November 2008 for technical meetings, and gave several public talks and media interviews about New Horizons in Canberra and Sydney. (NASA Photo)
But enough progress reporting. In this blog entry, I want to take a broader look at the big events along the remaining years of cruise flight to Pluto, and give you a bird’s-eye view of what lies ahead until the main event kicks off, six years from this month.
Three Years and Counting
As I noted above, we’re completing our third year of flight this month. A top-level way to look at our main mission is that our spacecraft is racing 24/7 for nine years begin our exploration of the Pluto system in January 2015, culminate that exploration with the Pluto flyby in July 2015, and follow that with nine months of transmitting data back to Earth. (Of course, we all hope the mission will be extended to fly on to explore primordial Kuiper Belt objects, but that’s a story I’ll detail some other day.)
But, let’s look into our flight to Pluto at the next level of detail. The nine-year flight can be broken down into three, three-year phases: early cruise (2006-2008), mid-cruise (2009-2011), and late cruise (2012-2014).
Early cruise is now behind us, and it was a busy time — no doubt about it. It included a full spacecraft checkout after launch and an intensive period of payload commissioning and calibration, and certification of vehicle and payload readiness for Pluto. It also included three trajectory correction maneuvers, a fleeting asteroid encounter, a six-month Jupiter system flyby, eight major flight software loads and a smattering of cruise Science activities. Moreover, our ground team also planned, executed and analyzed data from our Jupiter encounter, built a backup spacecraft avionics simulator called NHOPS II, designed detailed plans for our Pluto encounter, and began writing the actual command sequences that will drive New Horizons through its most intensive (“core”) exploration period — the seven days before and two days after closest approach to Pluto.
With the dawning of 2009, mid-cruise is now beginning. Although the next three years will be quieter than the past three, they are just as crucial to the success of New Horizons.
During mid-cruise, New Horizons will race from its current position just beyond 12 astronomical units from the Sun to almost 22 AU — ending up more than a quarter-billion kilometers beyond Uranus’ orbit and well toward Neptune’s. In terms of mid-cruise flight activities, we will conduct annual spacecraft and instrument checkouts, as well as a little more cruise science. But in addition, we plan to conduct some encounter test activities in 2010 and 2011. Based on our tracking data, we are also expecting another (small) course correction – less than one meter per second – in 2010.
Meanwhile, on the ground, in addition to planning and executing the spacecraft operations of mid-cruise, we will finish sequencing the nine-day “core” encounter command load, fully test it on the New Horizons spacecraft simulators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), and plan the surrounding nine weeks of approach and departure activities closest to Pluto.
Late in mid-cruise we’ll also initiate our KBO target search, and we also plan to replace the original (2004-era) computers in our Mission Operations Center (MOC) and Science Operations Center (SOC), so that at encounter these systems are still young enough to be fully reliable. With a mission staff of less than ten people — just half the size it was in early cruise, and more than 10 times smaller than what Voyager needed to fly across the same territory on its way to Uranus and Neptune — one thing is for sure: the Earthly crew of New Horizons is going to be very busy in during mid-cruise.
August Tour of Mission Operations Center
During an August 2008 tour of the New Horizons Mission Operations Center at APL, Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman provides a progress update to (clockwise, from near flag) Annette Tombaugh Sitze, daughter of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh; Wilbur Sitze, Clyde Tombaugh’s son-in-law; Siobhan Murphy-Elias, former city councilwoman in Clyde Tombaugh’s original hometown of Streator, Ill.; Carole Stern; Kyle Tombaugh, great grandson of Pluto’s discoverer; and Streator resident Kevin Elias. (JHUAPL photo)
During late cruise, which begins in January 2012, we’ll still (of course) conduct annual spacecraft and instrument checkouts, collect cruise science and perform trajectory corrections (if our navigation and mission design team deems them necessary). But we’ll also complete the KBO target search, complete the planning for the distant approach phase to Pluto, and carry out a comprehensive series of “contingency events” on the mission simulator to prove our spacecraft is capable of detecting and recovering from the most likely kinds of faults that could occur during the encounter in 2015.
But the planned centerpiece activities of late cruise will come in 2012 with a full-up in-flight encounter dress rehearsal (on the spacecraft) of the core nine-day encounter sequence, and a complete pre-encounter calibration of our instrument payload in 2014. We’ve also planned for a backup, second dress rehearsal onboard New Horizons in 2014, but we’d prefer to skip that and save the fuel and project costs if the 2013 dress rehearsal goes well. Also in 2013-2014, our APL mission team will staff up to prepare for 24/7 encounter activities in 2015 with — hold your breath — a whopping 20 people, including the project manager, navigation team, flight planners, flight controllers, education and public outreach, and a part-time secretary. By contrast, Voyager 2’s “skeleton” extended mission operations team for its 1989 Neptune encounter involved almost 150 people; robotic spaceflight sure has become much more efficient over the past 20 years.
Looking Ahead
With that overview in mind, you have a good idea of what’s ahead on the journey to Pluto – and you can see we’re not just twiddling our thumbs and waiting for the big events of 2015. In fact, I hope this "big picture" roadmap of our cruise flight and ground activities allows you to see the mission as we see it: a long, carefully orchestrated preparation for the one-shot chance to explore the archetype of dwarf planets, Pluto, and its system of moons. The United States and NASA will ultimately invest more than $700 million in this expedition, and we’re working hard to make sure we get the scientific goods at the far frontier of our solar system.
Artist Depiction of New Horizons arrival at Pluto
Arrival at Pluto: High noon (GMT) on Tuesday, July 14, 2015! (Artwork by Dan Durda and Ken Moscati)
But over the next six years, as we guide our bird to its target, plan every detail of her approach and close-up explorations, and test for her ability to react to unforeseen circumstances, we will also be doing one more thing: Continuing to be aware that “Murphy” – the infernal daemon of spaceflight – always lurks, challenging us to be ever vigilant across 3-billion-plus miles of abyssal vacuum and over 3,000 days of flight.
The scientific community and the taxpayers of the United States have entrusted us with a very special opportunity to explore a planet that is a billion miles farther away from Earth than any ever visited, and in doing so, to shed light on an impossibly ancient and yet entirely new frontier. So we aren’t taking our opportunity for granted, even during the “quiet” of mid-cruise.
Well, that’s the PI’s update for this time. I’ll be back with more news soon. In the meantime, keep on exploring, just as we do!
- Alan Stern
.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/whereisnh/current/nhcp20090401_0192.jpg
La New Horizons è adesso a poco più di un terzo del viaggio (a plutone)
Ever Plan Ahead? How About Six Years Ahead?
Things are going well out in the cold space between Saturn and Uranus where New Horizons is now. We’re now deep in planning for our spacecraft’s Annual Checkout this summer, which begins on July 7th. But that’s not what I want to write you about today: instead, it’s something called EPDR.
Now, despite still being more than six years and just over 18 Astronomical Units from the Pluto system, the New Horizons project team is conducting the second and final portion of our Pluto Encounter Preliminary Design Review (EPDR) on Wednesday and Thursday of this week at APL.
As you may recall, the first portion of the EPDR was conducted on 7 and 8 January. EPDR part two is another two day confab, in which the New Horizons technical and management team, will be presenting the detailed, minute by minute timelining of our planned 2015 Pluto encounter to a review team of expert planetary planners from across the nation. EPDR represents the culmination of almost two years of intense encounter planning involving the entire New Horizons science and mission team, and the stakes are high—this is the main technical review of what will be taking place when we get to Pluto to explore it and its satellites for the first time.
You might wonder why we’re planning the encounter so far in advance—after all, it won’t start in earnest for just over five and an half years as we begin our approach in early 2015. And in fact, when we first proposed and designed New Horizons, we didn’t set out to do this work until 2012 and 2013—which would have been in time to test the sequence on the ground and then in a flight rehearsal before the curtain on this historic first exploration of an ice dwarf planet and its system of moons begins. But in early 2007, as we were culminating our in flight planning for our Jupiter encounter that year, one of our lead science sequencing gurus, Ann Harch, lamented to me that it was too bad that we has to wait 5 or 6 years, getting rusty all that time, before planning the Pluto encounter.
Ann’s comment was brilliant and wise: for in one fell swoop she’d identified a theretofore undocumented mission risk. It didn’t take us long to see how to eliminate this risk though: Just plan the encounter at Pluto right after completing our successful Jupiter encounter. (Why we hadn’t thought of this before, I’ll never know, but I can guarantee you that when we get to Pluto, I’ll be nominating Ann for a NASA Exceptional Service Award.)
Well, regardless, I discussed this idea within the team, and people really liked it, so our Project Manager, Glen Fountain, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) where New Horizons was built and is now operated out of, took it forward to NASA for approval, which was granted in the spring of 2007.
The only catch in NASA’s approval: though the Agency was willing to spend some of our funds sooner to pay for the encounter planning in 2007-2008-2009, rather than in 2012-2013, there was to be no more money than we’d originally planned to spend, and we would have to finish the main portion of the encounter planning by the end of 2009 in order to remain on budget. Glen and I thought that was a pretty good trade and we accepted the challenge.
So beginning in the summer of 2007, we set out to plan an encounter that was then still 2 billion miles and almost a decade in the future. First off, the science team, led by our Pluto Encounter Planning (PEP) team boss Leslie Young, picked the best possible arrival date in mid-2015. The result, 14 July 2015 (Bastille Day!) gave us the best combination of encounter viewing of Pluto and its three moons of any day within the range of dates our fuel supply could allow us to reach.
Next the PEP team optimized the flyby closest approach distance to best study Pluto and all three of its known moons—not to far away lest we lose resolution, but not too close lest we crowd the pace of events in close and smear images. In the end, we chose a closest approach 12,500 kilometers from Pluto.
Following that, PEP began detailing how each and every Pluto system scientific observation would be carried out by the various scientific instruments on New Horizons—from mapping to composition studies to atmospheric escape, and on and on.
Then we wrote down all of the timeline requirements needed to fit these observations together, and traded or strategized our way out of the competing desires of our various instrument and science theme teams. Next up, we integrated hundreds of scientific observations during closest approach into a carefully choreographed encounter, feathering into that plan all of the final approach navigation, trajectory correction maneuvers, and communications requirements, and fitting all of this into the available command space memory, data recording memory, fuel budget, and so forth.
We also added backup observation opportunities for the most important science so that if a given observation failed, we got at least a second shot at it. And we added in a few artistic image sequences (such as a family portrait of Pluto in bound. and another as waning crescents as we go outbound.) This highly integrated and exquisitely choreographed plan was then put to a test on our mission simulator for testing. Having passed that milestone, it will be reviewed and critiqued by outside experts in the EPDR review this Thursday and Friday.
Following the EPDR, we will be waking up New Horizons for its 2009 checkout this July and August, and then we will return to encounter planning for the remainder of the year. So in the fall and early winter we will be finalizing the near encounter sequence by taking into account the actions cited by the EPDR review board and by also knocking off all the fine details of punch list (“to do”) items that we ourselves still have to clean up before we put the plan in the can, where it will sit until 2013 or 2014 when we gear up for a full in-flight rehearsal of the central 9 days around our closest approach.
And so what is in store for the encounter? In total, we have approximately 30 specific scientific objectives planned—from surface mapping to composition mapping to atmospheric studies to searches for new moons and rings. And in just the central 9 days around closest approach, over 380 observations are planned of Pluto, its moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra, and the space between and around this system.
And although the pace of activity and the highest resolution datasets will come in that 9 day “core encounter” period, the entire encounter New Horizons will last from January to July of 2015, allowing us to see Pluto and its moons in more and more detail as we fly up to them, and to study the way their surfaces and Pluto’s atmosphere is varying over this long time span.
New Horizons will spend most of 2015 training its package of seven imagers, spectrometers, and in situ plasma instruments on the Pluto system. (credit: Leslie Young, SwRI)
What I’ve been able to tell you in this blog entry is just a top level summary of planning that has taken place by the New Horizons team for our encounter, still six years hence. We’re anxiously looking forward to that day—in the middle of the coming decade—which will open up for study a new planet and whole new class of planetary bodies—the dwarf planets—on the unexplored frontier of the solar system.
Well, that’s it for now. I’ll be back in touch just before we begin spacecraft annual checkout in July. In the meantime, keep on exploring, just as we do!
-Alan Stern
4chr
Dato che non so bene l'inglese forse non ho capito bene: l'intera missione rischia di andare all'aria per via dei pochi soldi?!
Dato che non so bene l'inglese forse non ho capito bene: l'intera missione rischia di andare all'aria per via dei pochi soldi?!
No, dice che stanno conducendo la seconda e ultima fase del "Preliminary Design Review" (EPDR)* e spiega perchè hanno scelto di svolgere l'EPDR nel periodo 2007-2009 invece che nel 2012-2013 come originariamente previsto: in breve preferiscono farlo quando sono ancora "allenati" dal flyby di Giove invece di aspettare 5 anni.
Ad un certo punto Stern parla di budget perché queste attività richiedono soldi e per non sforare bisogna stare nei tempi previsti (cosa che loro stanno facendo :)).
* ovvero definiscono in modo preciso cosa faranno gli strumenti e la sonda in ogni momento del flyby con Plutone. Tutte le attività previste sono poi esaminate da esperti esterni al progetto.
No, dice che stanno conducendo la seconda e ultima fase del "Preliminary Design Review" (EPDR)* e spiega perchè hanno scelto di svolgere l'EPDR nel periodo 2007-2009 invece che nel 2012-2013 come originariamente previsto: in breve preferiscono farlo quando sono ancora "allenati" dal flyby di Giove invece di aspettare 5 anni.
Ad un certo punto Stern parla di budget perché queste attività richiedono soldi e per non sforare bisogna stare nei tempi previsti (cosa che loro stanno facendo :)).
* ovvero definiscono in modo preciso cosa faranno gli strumenti e la sonda in ogni momento del flyby con Plutone. Tutte le attività previste sono poi esaminate da esperti esterni al progetto.
Grazie, molto gentile ;)
http://www.planetary.org/image/nh_close_approach.jpg
http://www.planetary.org/image/science_overview.jpg
http://www.planetary.org/image/traceability.jpg
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/whereisnh/current/nhcp20090601_0692.jpg
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/whereisnh/overview/nhov20090601_0692.jpg
Da Alan Stern:
Flash report for today: New Horizons is awake after 202 days of hibernation that began way back on December 16th, and all systems telemetry looks good! Cruise checkout 3 has begun. It will continue until late August.
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/images/9_2_2009_1.jpg
:D
The PI’s Perspective: Science Never Sleeps
September 2, 2009
We put New Horizons back into hibernation last week, on Aug. 27. This event signaled the completion of our third active spacecraft and payload checkout, which occupied us for most of July and August.
Active Checkout Three (“ACO-3”) went very well, its objectives completed with no serious glitches. Our spacecraft and payload are healthy, on course and ready for a set of three hibernation periods that will stretch into late May.
Twice during the next nine months we’ll wake the spacecraft up for about 10 days at a time to re-point its antenna toward Earth and conduct a few minor maintenance activities. The first of these two wakeups will occur Nov. 9-18. Until then, New Horizons will report in with status beacon checks every Monday and telemetry sessions every other Thursday that update us on key spacecraft engineering parameters.
Meanwhile, our science and flight teams are reviewing ACO-3 data, scoping the list of activities for next summer’s ACO-4 (already!) and finalizing our Pluto near-encounter activities sequence. The science team is also planning a selection process for teams to search for our target Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs); proposals will be due early next year, with searches to take place in 2011 and 2012. And we’ve also been planning a science workshop at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore next May.
New Horizons is now almost 14.4 astronomical units from the Sun, and will cross the halfway point between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus next week. We’re now firmly in the “Centaur region” where escaped KBOs roam between the giant planets. (In fact, we regularly check to see if there is a chance encounter coming with any Centaurs, but so far, no known Centaur is passing closer than about half a billion kilometers from New Horizons.)
Farewell 2009
[Caption: "It's going to make it!" by 7 year old Piper Benson of Mexico City, depicting New Horizons, with the Pluto-Charon-Nix-Hydra system in the corner, and a small Sun. Piper was born when New Horizons was being designed and will just about ne a teenager when we arrive in 2015.]
New Horizons, is now over 1400 days into its 9.5 year journey and well over than 15 AU (Astronomical Units) from the Sun. We still have about 2050 days ahead of us before we reach the Pluto system, but later this month, on the 29th, the first of several mid-way milestones will be reached. As the graph below shows, New Horizons is then going to be closer to Pluto (the red line) than to Earth (the blue curve). This marker puts a nice capstone on our 2009, which took us another 500 million kilometers closer to our favorite planet, so far against the deep.
[Caption: Depicted here it the distance of New Horizons to both Earth (blue curve) and Pluto (red line) versus date.]
And on that long journey, things continue to go well. On November 20th we wrapped up 10 days of hibernation wake up activities and put the spacecraft back into hibernation until early January. The main goal of the 10-day November wake up period was to re-point our communications dish antenna to keep up with the changing position of the Earth around the Sun (by the way, it’s this same motion that causes the blue “Earth” line in the figure above to wiggle back and forth).
During last month’s wakeup we also downloaded several months of stored science data from the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, corrected a recently discovered bug in our fault protection system software, completed about a dozen tracking passes to help refine our trajectory, and uploaded instructions to run the spacecraft through early January. All of the goals of the November wake up were successfully completed, and telemetry shows that New Horizons is in very good health and almost exactly on its planned course.
Since I wrote you last, in early September, our ground team has been a lot busier than our spacecraft has, since they never hibernate. In addition to planning both the just-completed November wake up and the upcoming 10-day January wake up, they also now completed all but a few final details of the 9-day closest approach encounter command load for 2015 and verified this command load on the spacecraft simulators at the Applied Physics Lab in Maryland. Our ground team has also been hard at work planning next summer’s Active Checkout (ACO), which will run from late May to early July.
The 2010 ACO is our fourth one of the mission, so it’s called ACO-4. Unlike ACO-3, which was very lite on activity to give our ground team more time to work on Pluto encounter planning, ACO-4 will be chock-a-block with scheduled activities. Among these will be a complete spacecraft and instrument checkout new instrument calibrations to look for changes since our last set of cals in 2008, a trajectory correction maneuver (our first since 2007), a little cruise science focusing on the interplanetary environment and Uranus and Neptune imaging, more fault protection software upgrades, some tests associated with activities we’ll be conducting at Pluto, and our first-ever full length encounter mode test on the spacecraft.
And just in case you think the ground team still doesn’t have enough to do, they have also begun the detailed planning of the final few weeks of our approach to Pluto that precedes the 9-day close encounter period they’ve already planned out. All of this, mind you, by a team that is about 10 times smaller than what the venerable Voyager team had to work with when it’s Uranus and Neptune flybys were planned in the mid and late 1980s.
Before I close, I want to mention two other items you might find worth knowing about. First, on November 17th, the PBS television series NOVA visited New Horizons for a special, hosted by Neil Tyson, which it will air in early March. This episode will concern the subject of Neil’s book, “The Pluto Files.” I was interviewed in our control center and also meeting with Neil to discuss Pluto’s planethood.
[Caption: Neil Tyson and Alan Stern in the New Horizons control room for NOVA’s episode concerning Pluto, its planethood, and New Horizons; November 2009.]
Second, speaking of that same always-hot topic, there’s a fascinating new book out on the same, called “The Case for Pluto,” which was written by MSNBC’s science guy, Alan Boyle. I was asked to help critique early drafts, and in my opinion, Boyle has thought harder and more deeply about the topic than any journalist ever had. It’s a fun read too.
[Caption: Alan Boyle’s book on Pluto and the debates over what kinds of objects are planets is newly out, and makes entertaining and enlightening reading.]
As I write these words, we’re planning for our annual New Horizons science team meeting, which occurs every January near the anniversary of our launch in 2006. Among the topics to be discussed in detail will be the kickoff planning to search for our Kuiper Belt Object targets that we hope to flyby and reconnoiter after Pluto. Those searches will begin next summer and continue through 2011 and 2012. Hopefully, they’ll net us 4 to 10 targets to select from.
Well, that’s my update to you for now, thanks for following our journey to a new frontier. I’ll be back in touch in January, after the next time we wake the spacecraft up. In the meantime, keep on exploring, just as we do!
Alan Stern
4chr
jumpjack
25-11-2014, 09:19
Il 6 dicembre 2014 la sonda New Horizons (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons) della NASA si risveglierà per l'ultima volta dall'ibernazione (ha fatto diversi sonni dal 2006 a oggi) per iniziare finalmente a lavorare :read: .
A gennaio inizierà a scattare le prime immagini in lontananza di Plutone, che raggiungerà il 14 luglio 2015.
Sarà la prima volta che una sonda passa vicino a Plutone; al momento le immagini più definite che abbiamo di Plutone sono queste! :rolleyes:
http://www.earthlyissues.com/images/Pluto-browse.jpg
Durante le osservazioni, sfruttando la rotazione dei due corpi, si potrà ottenere una mappa priva di zone d'ombra. È previsto che l'avvicinamento a Plutone avvenga a 11 km/s fino ad una distanza di 9 600 km, mentre quello di Caronte avverrà a 27 000 km; questi parametri possono tuttavia subire modifiche durante la missione. Durante il fly-by le strumentazioni riprenderanno le immagini con una risoluzione massima di 25 m/pixel, a 4 colori, una mappa globale con risoluzione di 1,6 km, nella banda dell'infrarosso una mappa da 7 km/pixel globalmente o localmente di 0,6 km/pixel, per poter definire l'atmosfera dei pianeti.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Cronologia_della_missione
Arrivare su Plutone è complicato perchè è lontano alcuni MILIARDI di chilometri (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutone_(astronomia)) e fuori dal piano dell'eclittica.
Al momento New Horizons è a 3 miliardi di chilometri da casa (http://sen.com/news/new-horizons-to-wake-for-final-leg-of-journey-to-pluto).
Per arrivare fin laggiù New Horizons ha dovuto raggiungere la più alta velocità mai raggiunta da una sonda spaziale, 58536 km/h... tanto che non ruiscirà neanche a fermarsi su Plutone: dopo pochi giorni dedicati alla mappatura, "scivolerà" via ancora più lontano, diretto alla lontanissima Fascia di Kuiper (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascia_di_Kuiper), che dovrebbe raggiungere entro il 2020.
zulutown
25-11-2014, 10:13
Per arrivare fin laggiù New Horizons ha dovuto raggiungere la più alta velocità mai raggiunta da una sonda spaziale, 58536 km/h...
Non penso sia la più alta velocità. Usando l'allineamento tra grandi pianeti e le fionde gravitazionali degli anni 70 le sonde voyager stanno andando molto più veloci e una di esse è praticamente irraggiungibile.
In un comunicato NASA/JPL parlavano di New Horizons come l'oggetto più veloce lanciato dall'uomo. NH ha avuto "solo" un gravity-assist da Giove, mentre le Voyager ne hanno sfruttati più di uno (Giove e Saturno se non erro).
zulutown
25-11-2014, 15:07
In un comunicato NASA/JPL parlavano di New Horizons come l'oggetto più veloce lanciato dall'uomo. NH ha avuto "solo" un gravity-assist da Giove, mentre le Voyager ne hanno sfruttati più di uno (Giove e Saturno se non erro).
credo sia la velocità di fuga dalla gravità terrestre.
in termini di velocità di fuga dal sistema solare, i voyager sono abbastanza sicuro siano molto più veloci (e lo saranno fino a che non si avrà modo di avere di nuovo lo speciale allineamento dei pianeti che c'era stato nell'epoca dei voyager)
credo sia la velocità di fuga dalla gravità terrestre.
in termini di velocità di fuga dal sistema solare, i voyager sono abbastanza sicuro siano molto più veloci (e lo saranno fino a che non si avrà modo di avere di nuovo lo speciale allineamento dei pianeti che c'era stato nell'epoca dei voyager)
si esatto
Esatto, NH è l'oggetto terrestre lanciato alla maggior velocità di fuga dalla Terra.
A Voyager 1 spetta il titolo per la maggiore velocità di allontamento dalla Terra fuori dal sistema solare, cioè nello spazio interstellare (circa 17 km/s o 61.200 km/h :fagiano: ). La maggiore velocità assoluta mai registrata spetta invece alla sonda Helios B in orbita ellittica attorno al Sole (circa 71 km/s o 255.600 km/h :eek: :) ).
Pronti per il risveglio? :D
Certo! :cool: :)
SFN.com:
New Horizons awake for Pluto encounter
Posted on December 8, 2014 by Stephen Clark
http://spaceflightnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/nh_pluto.png
Artist’s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft approaching Pluto and its moon Charon. Credit: JHUAPL/SwRI
Speeding through the outer solar system after a nine-year trek from Earth, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is awake and preparing for an encounter next summer with Pluto.
The probe’s mission control center in Maryland received signals from New Horizons at 9:53 p.m. EST Saturday (0253 GMT Sunday), confirming the spacecraft was active after rousing itself from hibernation more than 2.9 billion miles from Earth.
Traveling at light speed, the radio signal took 4 hours and 26 minutes to reach Earth, according to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., home of New Horizons mission control.
“This is a watershed event that signals the end of New Horizons crossing of a vast ocean of space to the very frontier of our solar system, and the beginning of the mission’s primary objective: the exploration of Pluto and its many moons in 2015,” said Alan Stern, chief scientist on the New Horizons mission from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Saturday’s wakeup starts several weeks of preparations, testing and priming of New Horizons to formally start collecting scientific observations of Pluto and its surroundings on Jan. 15.
The robotic spacecraft is due to fly 6,200 miles from Pluto on July 14, 2015. It promises to bring the distant world into focus, replacing fuzzy images from the Hubble Space Telescope with high-resolution photos that will help scientists map craters, mountains and ice sheets believed to cover Pluto’s crust.
New Horizons has spent about two-thirds of its flight time in hibernation since the craft launched in January 2006. But officials periodically woke up the probe to test instruments and practice for the encounter at Pluto, when scientists have only one chance to get it right.
“Technically, this was routine, since the wakeup was a procedure that we’d done many times before,” said Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager at APL. “Symbolically, however, this is a big deal. It means the start of our pre-encounter operations.”
The hibernations saved time, officials said, allowing scientists to focus on planning the mission’s future scientific endeavors instead of tracking its flight through the void of space.
In the next few weeks, ground controllers will prep New Horizons and its seven science instruments for the flyby.
http://spaceflightnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141208_1b_lg.jpg
New Horizons mission operations team member Karl Whittenburg and mission operations manager Alice Bowman watch screens for data confirming that the New Horizons spacecraft had transitioned from hibernation to active mode on Dec. 6. Credit: APL
“We’ll have about six weeks to do final preparations for the encounter,” said Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager at APL. “We’ll be downlinking data — health and safety data — that was collected over this hibernation period. We’ll be doing memory checks on the different components on the spacecraft. We’ll be downlinking all the instrument data that we collected during hibernation.”
Engineers will upload the latest pointing and navigation data to New Horizons and wipe the memory of the probe’s data recorder, which will store information collected by the spacecraft’s sensors over the next year.
“When we first launched this spacecraft, I was amazed that we were going to have a 10-gigabit recorder space … Silly me, I thought for that scientists, that’s great. They’re going to have a hard time filling that up. Boy, was I wrong.”
New Horizons will spend the first three months of 2015 taking photos of Pluto to ensure the spacecraft is on track for the flyby. The probe’s instruments will also record the plasma and dust environment as it darts through the outer solar system for comparison with data gathered at Pluto, according to Hal Weaver, the New Horizons project scientist at APL.
“New Horizons is on a journey to a new class of planets we’ve never seen, in a place we’ve never been before,” Weaver said. “For decades we thought Pluto was this odd little body on the planetary outskirts; now we know it’s really a gateway to an entire region of new worlds in the Kuiper Belt, and New Horizons is going to provide the first close-up look at them.”
By May, a telescopic camera aboard the spacecraft will start taking images of Pluto with better clarity than possible with Hubble, which is stationed in Earth orbit.
“I expect we’re going to find lots of surprises,” Stern said. “That’s the most common thing on a first reconnaissance mission — we find things that we didn’t expect just by going and having a look with powerful instrumentation.”
http://spaceflightnow.com/2014/12/08/new-horizons-awake-for-pluto-encounter/
jumpjack
18-12-2014, 19:19
Conferenza stampa in streaming tra 10 minuti, alle 20.30 italiane del 18 dicembre:
http://live.projectionnet.com/AGUPress2014/FM2014.aspx
jumpjack
18-12-2014, 22:12
Conferenza stampa in streaming tra 10 minuti, alle 20.30 italiane del 18 dicembre:
http://live.projectionnet.com/AGUPress2014/FM2014.aspx
I pianeti nani "compagni" di Plutone, nella fascia di Kuiper, sono più numerosi di tutti gli altri pianeti del sistema solare messi insieme.
Ormai già da maggio le immagini scattate da New Horizons sono più definite di quelle di Hubble.
Intorno al "pianeta nano binario plutone-caronte" potrebbero trovarsi in orbita altri tre pianeti nani: Hydra, Nix e Kerberos.
Verranno fatte foto da 90 m/pixel, e mappate anche le superfici di Nyx e Hydra.
Verranno studiate formazione ed evoluzione dei pianeti nani.
New Horizons sfruttera delle eclissi sole-plutone per studiare l'atmosfera di plutone.
Si studierà anche in che modo il vento solare "strappa" l'atmosfera ai pianeti.
Verranno cercate anche eventuali molecole organiche.
jumpjack
18-12-2014, 22:28
La minima distanza da Plutone verrà raggiunta il 14 luglio 2015.
Verranno registrati 16 mesi di dati... e inviati a terra a lla velocità di 768 BIT al secondo! :eek:
"Plutopalooza" è un programma della NASA per rendere nota la missione al grande pubblico.
E' possibile stamparsi un modello 3d:
http://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/new-horizons
Ci sono vari pezzi da montare insieme,ecco quindi una vista d'insieme:
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/137125main_instruments_lg.gif
Verranno inviate più di 1000 immagini dell'avvicinamento.
A bordo ci sono anche strumenti progettati da studenti, i "pluto pals" (gli amici di plutone).
Uscirà un cortometraggio intitolato "l'anno di plutone" che spiega la missione.
jumpjack
20-02-2015, 13:43
Nuove immaginii:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20150218
Io neanche lo sapevo che plutone avesse 4 satelliti!
bello, anche solo per spezzare l'attesa visto che le immagini migliori sono ormai prossime ad arrivare :)
jumpjack
10-03-2015, 14:00
bello, anche solo per spezzare l'attesa visto che le immagini migliori sono ormai prossime ad arrivare :)
Per quando sono in programma?
Intanto "riassumo".
Dalla Terra:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2015/01/15/new-horizons-pluto/assets/780622-charon-discovery.jpg
Luglio 2014:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2015/01/15/new-horizons-pluto/assets/140700-pluto-and-charon.gif
Gennaio 2015:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2015/01/15/new-horizons-pluto/assets/150125-31-one-day.gif
Febbraio 2015:
http://i.space.com/images/i/000/045/746/i02/nix-hydra-new-horizons.jpg
Hubble:
http://www.npr.org/assets/img/2014/12/04/pluto.gif
Stranezza:
The best images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest a mottled surface of bright and dark patches that are changing over time.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/13/science/space/photos-of-pluto-from-nasa-new-horizons.html?_r=0
Come può esserci una superficie mutevole su un pianetino a 200 gradi sotto zero?!?
Per quando sono in programma?
la distanza minima sarà a luglio ma, vado a memoria, dovrebbero cominciare a scattare immagini anche prima. Il punto è la trasmissione dei dati alla terra che impiegherà un bel po' :(
Come può esserci una superficie mutevole su un pianetino a 200 gradi sotto zero?!?
rotazione? ci sono conferme in merito?
jumpjack
10-03-2015, 18:00
700 bit al secondo...
Ho letto che ci vorranno NOVE MESI per scaricare tutte le immagini del sorvolo!
Errori ortografici by Tapatalk
+Benito+
20-05-2015, 15:29
Da alcuni giorni la risoluzione ottenibile dalla nuova posizione di NH supera quella ottenibile da Hubble, spero, sempre che stiano scattando qualcosa, tra qualche giorno inizino a diffondere informazioni sul nuovo mondo. P.S. NH riuscirà a fare qualche scatto di Eris? E' lontano, ma mi sembra che la posizione orbitale sia favorevole. Purtroppo le info su eris sono pochissime.
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