Monday, November 07, 2005
There are a lot of budget cuts going on at JPL - the rewards of success are seeing your projects canceled to fund the manned programs. Sigh. Still I confess that I have been very lukewarm about the Dawn mission for a very long time.
1) It's using antiquated hardware originally designed as a backup for the Deep Space 1 mission. By the time of launch the basic hardware will be well over 10 years old.
2) It's a 9+ year mission to study two very large differentiated bodies in a realm (the asteroid belt) where SEP (solar electric propulsion) does not work well.
Distant differentiated bodies like Ceres don't interest me. All that means is that the useful materials are buried deep where they can't be easily got at by the primitive mining techniques we have as yet developed. Undifferentiated rocks are possibly of less interest to science, but are far easier to mine.
Far better to launch Dawn towards any of the 3000+ near earth asteroids and comets, where it could survey 1 NEO (more or less) per year in flight, thus giving us a much better overview of the characteristics of the most energetically available off-planet resources.
I won't cry if Dawn is canceled entirely... but I would jump for joy if someone in congress or NASA got a clue and vectored Dawn towards an M class ("M" meaning metal-bearing) asteroid like Amun or an Apohele like 2003 CP20 or any of a variety of other noteworthy asteroids
1) It's using antiquated hardware originally designed as a backup for the Deep Space 1 mission. By the time of launch the basic hardware will be well over 10 years old.
2) It's a 9+ year mission to study two very large differentiated bodies in a realm (the asteroid belt) where SEP (solar electric propulsion) does not work well.
Distant differentiated bodies like Ceres don't interest me. All that means is that the useful materials are buried deep where they can't be easily got at by the primitive mining techniques we have as yet developed. Undifferentiated rocks are possibly of less interest to science, but are far easier to mine.
Far better to launch Dawn towards any of the 3000+ near earth asteroids and comets, where it could survey 1 NEO (more or less) per year in flight, thus giving us a much better overview of the characteristics of the most energetically available off-planet resources.
- Dawn stands down: “Yes…NASA has asked us to stand down,” said Dawn’s principal investigator, Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “None of us take this as any indication that they [NASA Headquarters] do not want to launch Dawn,” he told SPACE.com, given “strong words of support” from space agency personnel in Washington, D.C.
Russell said that Dawn is an extremely robust mission. The particular launch opportunity that the spacecraft mission is heading for is extremely long—over a year long, he noted.
I won't cry if Dawn is canceled entirely... but I would jump for joy if someone in congress or NASA got a clue and vectored Dawn towards an M class ("M" meaning metal-bearing) asteroid like Amun or an Apohele like 2003 CP20 or any of a variety of other noteworthy asteroids
Labels: asteroids, dawn mission, space, space05
¶ 2:11 PM
