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We can make it to Mercury. In fact, putting a spacecraft in orbit around Mercury is made more difficult because of the need to decelerate against the Sun's grav
by rrss1122 12y ago
We can make it to Mercury. In fact, putting a spacecraft in orbit around Mercury is made more difficult because of the need to decelerate against the Sun's gravity.
If you look at the Wikipedia page for the MESSENGER mission, you'll see they tackled that problem by using gravity assists from Earth, Venus, and Mercury to reduce MESSENGER's relative velocity with Mercury and allow it to go into orbit. These gravity assists greatly reduced the propulsion requirements.
- rosser 12y agoI'm not sure how much I like the idea of using the Earth for a gravity assist on a nuclear waste payload. Getting that one wrong (anyone remember the meters vs. feet debacle with a Mars probe?) wouldn't end well...
- skrause 12y agoWell, we have done at least one Earth gravity assist with a nuclear payload in the past. There also was some criticism about it back then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutonium_power_source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutoni...