Kentucky Space

Hitching an Asteroid ride to Mars

Finishing a conference in Italy on outer solar system and deep space exploration, Paul Gilster reports on one of the many papers he pledges to blog about in the future - using near Earth objects (NEOs), asteroids in this case, as convenient transfer points:

"The idea here is that the astronauts can use the NEO as a radiation shield, digging in to its surface and exploiting its resources on the way to the red planet. Greg presented a table showing candidate objects that could fill the bill, including two — 1999YR14 and 2007EE26 — that have one Earth-Mars transit time amounting to one year or less."

See the entire post at the highly recommended blog Centauri Dreams.

Reading Paul's entry, my mind immediately wandered to the mission to the moon Phobos, which may or may not be an asteroid captured by Mars, and the Rosetta mission to orbit and land on Comet 67 P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Rosetta has already flown past the asteroid 2867-Steins (video is available on YouTube) and will encounter 21-Lutetia at roughly this time next year.

And the artist's image of the lander, Philae, lashed to the comet (above) has to be one of my favorite space images ever. Click to enlarge.

Now for a bit of housekeeping: Kentucky Space blog will be on hold for the next week as I spend some time away from the computer monitor on vacation with my family. See you a bit later.

Wayne

Credits: ESA, image by AOES Medialab

Kentucky Space at CubeSat Developers Workshop

As mentioned Friday, Kentucky Space will have two presentations at the 2009 CubeSat Developers Workshop, which begins tomorrow at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. We'll try to get you some updates.

If you don't already, please follow Kentucky Space on Twitter. The timeline is hosted in the right sidebar of the blog.

Wayne

MESSENGER: maneuvering with the "soft breath" of the sun

Nice quote below. By orienting the craft toward the sun, the MESSENGER team was able to use the resulting solar pressure - in effect, a solar sailing technique - to fine tune the trajectory of the spacecraft on its second flyby of Mercury, achieving a record for precision. It missed its targeted altitude by only .6 kilometers, according to the blog, Musings of a MESSENGER Fellow.

The quote:

That’s pretty remarkable targeting, given that MESSENGER has traveled 668 million kilometers since its last deep space maneuver in March, [MESSENGER Mission Design Lead Jim] McAdams says. 'It’s as if we shot an arrow from New York to a target in Los Angeles – nudged it three times mid-stream with a soft breath – and arrived within the width of the arrow’s shaft at the target.'

Above is an artist's impression of the long, steep cliffs that extend for hundreds of kilometers on Mercury¹s surface in both Mariner 10 and MESSENGER images. These giant cliffs are believed to have formed when Mercury's interior cooled and the entire planet shrank slightly as a result.

Credit: Michael Carroll/Alien Volcanoes by Lopes and Carroll, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Wayne

Von Braun Sketches to be Released

A collection of sketches from German scientist Werner Von Braun, who was instrumental in the development of the United States space program, and in particular the Apollo program, are set to be sold at acution according to the Washington Post.

The collection includes sketches of a wall of computer mainframes, detailed schematics of what a working space rocket and space station might look like, as well as the drawing of a capsule with a handwritten notation that said 'for trip around the moon.' One of the designs up for sale is described by von Braun as a 'baby satellite.'

'Von Braun saw these articles as very serious events, and he wanted to make sure the illustrations were based on real science,' said Catherine Williamson, director for books and manuscripts for Bonhams. 'These drawings are famous in their own right, and are well-known by collectors interested in space.'

Wayne

Image: Saturn I rocket profiles SA-1 through SA-10, originally from NASA and located here on the Wikipedia commons.

Space artist Mark Maxwell: "We're on a spaceship right now"

Space artist Mark Maxwell was kind enough to take a couple questions from Jeffrey Manber while both were in Lexington recently to visit Kentucky Space. Answering the question about the purpose of space art, Mark said that people often forget that we're on a spacecraft now traveling at thousands of miles per hour, it's just that "we forget to look up." And replying to Jeffrey's question about accuracy in his work, he points out that great space art must also make us feel something about the subject.

The image on the left is a page from Aeromancy.us, Mark's web site and is used with permission.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Chesley Bonestell