Maven Leaves Earth
MAVEN Leaves Earth for Mars
“Flight of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft continues to go well following an on-time launch at 1:28 p.m. EST aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.”
NASA TV coverage.
MAVEN Leaves Earth for Mars
“Flight of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft continues to go well following an on-time launch at 1:28 p.m. EST aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.”
NASA TV coverage.
Maven & the Siding Spring Comet. What happened to the opportunity of viewing Comet Siding Spring at Mars? Lately, there is little public discussion of this cometary close encounter of Mars. Well, here are some details on Siding Spring?
The Siding Spring comet’s close encounter with Mars is an unprecedented event for any inner Solar System planet. No known comet has come closer than 1 million miles of Earth in the last 2000 years. Comet ISON is flying by Mercury but still over a million miles away. The Mars encounter with Siding Spring is, for all astronomical intents and purposes, a bulls eye encounter. And had this event involved Earth and not Mars, the combination of the close encounter and the Chelyabinsk event would have given us, real fast, a complete program for finding near-Earth objects. This would have been a very scary close encounter had it been Earth. The early estimates had Mars within the error bars of Siding Spring’s closest approach.
There are nearly 400 coordinate measurements over a years time. The nominal closest approach distance is 88,000 miles (141K km) +- 13K miles (20K km). As comparison, the distance from Earth to the Moon is 239K miles (384K km). Siding Spring is flying about 1/3rd of a Lunar Distance by Mars. In comparison, Phobos orbits at 5800 miles(9.4K km), Deimos at 14K miles (23K km) and Maven’s elliptical orbit will be 3900 miles (6.2K km) x 93 miles (150 km) and it arrives on September 22, 2014.
The Siding Spring comet flies by Mars on October 19, 2014 at a relative speed of 125,000 mph (201K kph, 56 km/sec). At this speed, the comet will pass 1 million miles fore and aft of Mars in just 16 hours, closest approach will be about a 4 hour window. This thing is booking!
The good, bad and the ugly – it won’t damage our vehicles at Mars, too bad it wasn’t a closer encounter and had it hit Mars, it would have dramatically altered the Martian surface and atmosphere and likely destroyed Opportunity, the 3 or 4 orbiting probes and maybe even Curiosity. The opportunity Maven has is that with 3 weeks they could choose to do an accelerated check out of science instruments, usually done over 1 month, and train a near ideal set of instruments on the comet. Giotto flew within 372 miles (600 km) of Halley’s in 1986 and Deep Impact flew within 310 miles (500 km) of Tempel 1 while the comet was in a quiescent state. Maven’s instrument set are state of the art and at 88,000 miles should return some excellent data.