4 ms·

It's orbiting the wrong way around, so you need to lose all of your orbital momentum and add it all back again. This is an extremely expensive maneuver to do i

It's orbiting the wrong way around, so you need to lose all of your orbital momentum and add it all back again. This is an extremely expensive maneuver to do in the inner solar system (i.e. from an Earth launch). The easiest way to do this is to achieve near escape velocity and adjust your orbit on the cheap at the edge of the solar system, but now you're talking about a mission which would span several decades.

mrfusion 8y ago
Nah. Just do a slingshot around Jupiter to turn Around.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Not sure if your comment is sarcastic, but I'll humor it. Jupiter is orbiting the sun at 13 km/s (very fast). If you slingshot around it, you can definitely be moving away from it at a decent clip. However, you'll still be going around the sun at a pace near 13 km/s (very fast). You still have to lose all of that orbital velocity before you can even think about going in the other direction. And even if you reduce your orbital velocity to zero, now you're just going to fall into the sun. You need to add the bulk of what you just lost back into your orbital energy, but going the other direction. All of this has to be precicely manuvered to put you in an orbit to meet up with the probe. On top of all of that, you still have to climb out of Earth's gravity well and spend a lot of fuel getting to Jupiter. Also, once you start going the other direction, gravity assists become much more difficult to do with anything spinning normally. Inversely, if you don't turn around, you'll just wiz by the object when you meet up with it and have hardly any time for science.
gene-h 8y ago
Maybe we can take advantage of the fact it's orbiting the wrong way. Perhaps we can send an impactor and capture some of the ejecta. At the very least we can analyze the spectra of the impact flash to see what it's made of. Perhaps we can even fly through the ejecta plume and run it into a mass spectrometer to do isotopic analysis. If the time between the impactor and the probe is short enough, perhaps the ejecta will still be plasma which we can run straight through our mass spectrometer. It might even be possible to capture a small amount of ejecta if we use something like an aerogel particle collector like the Stardust mission used[0]. [0]https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/mission/index-aerogel-rd.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/mission/index-ae...
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Maybe, but that will still be very hard. After the collision a lot of the debris will still be moving at a speed and direction comparable to the asteroid's original trajectory. Because the asteroid will have the greater mass, you'll find it'll be the net exporter of inertia into the impact mass. On top of that, making the rendezvous at such an extreme difference of speed will be very difficult.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  Problem with an impactor (besides any trailing analytical probes being sandblasted by ejecta) is that its a permanent expirement that can screw up any future passive observational experiments That being said, if we do eventually find another retrograde asteroid that is otherwise unremarkable, I would be all for an extreme speed impact experiment. If it's close enough to the sun we may even get some low grade relativistic effects being observed

mrfusion 8y ago

Nah. Just do a slingshot around Jupiter to turn Around.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Not sure if your comment is sarcastic, but I'll humor it. Jupiter is orbiting the sun at 13 km/s (very fast). If you slingshot around it, you can definitely be moving away from it at a decent clip. However, you'll still be going around the sun at a pace near 13 km/s (very fast). You still have to lose all of that orbital velocity before you can even think about going in the other direction. And even if you reduce your orbital velocity to zero, now you're just going to fall into the sun. You need to add the bulk of what you just lost back into your orbital energy, but going the other direction. All of this has to be precicely manuvered to put you in an orbit to meet up with the probe. On top of all of that, you still have to climb out of Earth's gravity well and spend a lot of fuel getting to Jupiter. Also, once you start going the other direction, gravity assists become much more difficult to do with anything spinning normally. Inversely, if you don't turn around, you'll just wiz by the object when you meet up with it and have hardly any time for science.

gene-h 8y ago

Maybe we can take advantage of the fact it's orbiting the wrong way. Perhaps we can send an impactor and capture some of the ejecta. At the very least we can analyze the spectra of the impact flash to see what it's made of. Perhaps we can even fly through the ejecta plume and run it into a mass spectrometer to do isotopic analysis. If the time between the impactor and the probe is short enough, perhaps the ejecta will still be plasma which we can run straight through our mass spectrometer. It might even be possible to capture a small amount of ejecta if we use something like an aerogel particle collector like the Stardust mission used[0]. [0]https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/mission/index-aerogel-rd.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/mission/index-ae...

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Maybe, but that will still be very hard. After the collision a lot of the debris will still be moving at a speed and direction comparable to the asteroid's original trajectory. Because the asteroid will have the greater mass, you'll find it'll be the net exporter of inertia into the impact mass. On top of that, making the rendezvous at such an extreme difference of speed will be very difficult.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
Problem with an impactor (besides any trailing analytical probes being sandblasted by ejecta) is that its a permanent expirement that can screw up any future passive observational experiments That being said, if we do eventually find another retrograde asteroid that is otherwise unremarkable, I would be all for an extreme speed impact experiment. If it's close enough to the sun we may even get some low grade relativistic effects being observed