From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Wed Apr 19 2000 - 01:05:17 MDT
From: Doug Jones <random@qnet.com>
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000
>Without some mighty heroic (ie nano) tech, a visit to the clouds of
>Jupiter would be one-way. The delta-V to climb to low jovian orbit is in
>excess of 30 km/s. As the navy bubblehead[1] who transferred into
>aviation noted, what goes up must come down, but the inverse is not
>necessarily true...
...and what goes around eventually comes down (when it runs out of fuel!)
On a different, but related topic.. Some of you may know that
the Galileo project has been discussing for quite some time (years)
about what to do with the Galileo spacecraft, which has been in orbit
around Jupiter since December 1995, when the spacecraft runs out of
fuel. It basically runs out fuel not long after the Cassini-Jupiter flyby
this December 2000 (some fine dual-spacecraft observations planned between
Galileo and Cassini. My group has dust detectors on both spacecraft.)
I've seen a number of different proposals, and the latest one
to come out of JPL last week is to send the Galileo spacecraft into
Jupiter near the end of 2003. Galileo's final (proposed) orbital trajectory
has a very long ellipital orbit (that, at apojove, carries it out
into the region of the solar wind), which is not that different
from the orbit comet Shoemaker-Levy 9!
So we'll finally get dust measurements close to the planet
... at 1 R_jup ... and less ...
(It's mind-boggling to think about.)
Amara
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Amara Graps | Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kernphysik
Interplanetary Dust Group | Saupfercheckweg 1
+49-6221-516-543 | 69117 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de * http://galileo.mpi-hd.mpg.de/~graps
*****************************************************************
"Never fight an inanimate object." - P. J. O'Rourke
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