The European Space Agency is going to visit a new comet in 2028. Which one? We haven't discovered it yet The European Space Agency is embarking on a new mission to a faraway comet floating on the outer edges of the Solar System that is yet to be discovered. The mission dubbed "Comet Interceptor" was chosen as part of ESA's Cosmic Vision programme, a series of long term projects launching between 2015 and 2025. Three spacecraft …
Does success there herald miracles were/are always available upon valid request? Or are they to be Heavenly Desired and Virtually Delivered Much Sooner in Future Scriptures to Follow/Realise/Project onto/into Any Communicative Device System.
Be Careful out there in Space. There be Daemons and Fiends that Foster Friends to Fester and Degrade Hunting to Just Extinction a prize not to be well deserved and mutually beneficial.
*Vital Bits
"Be Careful out there in Space. There be Daemons and Fiends"Post proof or retract. ...... jake
What more proof does one need, jake, than the conflict and CHAOS and wars and rebellions which abound and rebound all around.
Do you think there be the likes of a Virtually Real Resistance with Effective AIMaquisard .... Heavily into Daemons and Fiends that Foster Friends to Fester and Degrade Hunting?
Oh, and are your communications networks providing them ready direct access to their almighty arsenal of weapons and rich targets?
And to save on a great waste of brainpower, is the correct answer to all of those questions a highly disturbing and extremely disruptive and most unambiguous ..... Yes, of course, why ever not?
That's not proof, amfM. That's conjecture.
And it's somewhat Earth-centric. I believe you said "out there in space", which starts (by international convention) at the Kármán line ... That's 100km up (about 62 miles), if Martians don't speak Hungarian.
"the spacecraft is nothing but a pile of debris after it was ordered to crash headfirst into the comet in September 2016"
Not really. It 'crashed' at 2mph. Any faster and it probably would have bounced off. I suspect it's very much in one piece unless it's been dislodged by outgassing.
However, pints for science! Yay.
"Initially, the three probes will travel together as one larger composite spacecraft before they split into separate modules."
Guys, you're supposed to join the spaceships together to make a giant robot, not split it into smaller spacecraft. You just can't get the staff these days...
... someone has inhaled a trifle too much cosmik debris.
Or perhaps they are calling attention to the misunderstood, un-studied and generally ignored Mars Trojans and the like? I mean, the obvious pro-Oortness of this mission is clearly to the detriment of the other bits & bobs floating around out there. INNER SYSTEM ROCKS MATTER!
One of the Unis has got planet models on its path out to its observatory, and the distance between them is scaled to the size of the models. I am trying to remember which Uni it was. Possibly York. Someone will know.
Anyway, fair old number of strides between them.
That is truly a wonderful model. My mind is boggled. The author's comments are a high point.
Footnote: the alternate units of measurement have a lot in common with the El Reg's standards.
Have one of these for posting it. --------->
And you need to learn/understand the practicalities of drawing astronomical objects and distances to scale. Your screen would need to be the size of 100 football fields. So, get real! It's only an artistic impression.
That was the initial orbit, at a point where the eccentricity was quite uncertain (but was almost certainly parabolic or elliptical; the e=1.06 orbit never should have been published.) Further observations improved the orbit; with current data, e=1.002 +/- 0.005. And it'll pass perihelion in February 2020; the idea here is to catch an object _before_ perihelion.
Aside from that, this is about as good as we're apt to get. We've found exactly one truly interstellar object thus far (`Oumuamua, in October 2017). They don't appear to be common.
If you want a pristine frozen piece of the Oort cloud, shouldn't your mission go out there to get said piece? Otherwise, aren't you risking that your "pristine" comet has actually made numerous trips into the inner solar system, but just not in a timeframe or with a level of ostentatious display that was detectable by modern science?
Obviously, getting out to the Oort cloud means a tremendously long journey, but NASA's New Horizon probe shows that it can be done and that great science can be retrieved by a craft at that distance from the Earth. You'd have to work out how to get a probe out there at speed, and still be able to orbit or land on a proto-comet, which sounds like no mean trick. However, I would think that would be the only way to make sure you have a pristine sample instead of one that has been compromised by one or more run-ins with the Sun.
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