NASA is sending two small hand-luggage suitcase-sized spacecraft into the void to study binary asteroids NASA is splashing $55m on a new space mission to send two small camera-carrying spacecraft into the heavens to study a type of an object in our Solar System that has yet to be observed in detail: binary asteroids. Asteroids are typically lone chunks of dirt and rock that travel around larger bodies like the planets or the Sun …
Andre Norton had an entertaining series about Janus. It wasn't just an Asteroid in her books though :)
I wonder what the orbital period of the smaller satellite is? The primary isn't terribly large, and is probably not endowed with huge gravity. Even with a close orbit as apparent in the pictures, I'm guessing it's still pretty slow. Anyone knowledgeable in these things?
Edit: I discovered it has its own Wikipedia page, which lists the secondary period as a tad over 16 hours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(175706)_1996_FG3
Been there, done that...
Flying Ryanair from Blighty back home to Belgium. Quite late, and didn't want to wait for baggage reclaim. "All" I had in the bag was a change of clothes and a quick trip to Sainsbury's worth of "emergency" supplies - stuff I couldn't get locally. Which in this case was a bunch of drinkable squash to disguise Brussels horrible tap water, jars of peanut butter etc. And inexplicably, 4 Curly Wurly's that I'd been craving - despite the fact that I was living in the land of chocolate to die for
So as the stewardess goes down the line of passengers, screening us for scumbags who've taken the piss on hand luggage rules, I'm swinging this bag on one finger as if it weighs nothing. Which hurts my finger unsurprisingly.
And she takes it off me looking apologetic as it's obvious from this that it doesn't weigh anything. And then it plummets to the ground with a loud thud, as my cunning trick has obviously fooled her into thinking it's feather-light - but not enough to actually stop her checking. Curses! Foiled again!
I think these are models built from the Arecibo/Goldstone imaging of 1996 FG3 using Doppler radar. There are some details and image resolutions given in this paper. There is more detail here.
who don't we make a dozen and send them into the asteroid belt and just let them wander around ? Who knows what they will come across.
Yep: good chances that they will bump into something but hopefully will have shown us something interesting before then.
If NASA can find a bit more loose change then something similar to the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, not just in the solar plane, might be good -- although they would need a heck of an initial push to get them there in a time that has political payback.
Pretty much. Any probe randomly going though the (main) asteroid belt is likely to come across a whole lot of nothing. One is considerably (70x) more likely to win the UK national lottery than to come across anything in the asteroid belt without specifically aiming for it.
The total mass hanging around the asteroid belt is approximately 524,707,142,857,142,900,000 KiloJubs and roughly 50% of this total mass is to be found in the four largest asteroids: Ceres (6.7 million Linguine in diameter), Vesta, Pallas and Hygiea (each with a diameter of less than 30,000 Osmans). As half of the mass is found in these four this leaves considerably more nothing to aim for.
An important consideration when planning a probe excursion through the asteroid belt is to time this so it doesn't happen on a Friday afternoon. All odds change significantly then.
Cheaper. The incremental cost of each article is a lot lower than the first one (which has all the prototypes and R&D hours loaded into it)
There's still the launch costs of course but the "actual hardware cost" of the equipment being launched is usually surprisingly low
A shotgun approach makes sense from a business point of view but not a national prestige one
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