Hayabusa-2 22 miles from Ryugu
Hayabusa-2 has moved to within 23 miles of the asteroid Ryugu and is expected to reach its planned 12 mile rendezvous distance on June 27.
No new pictures, though I wouldn’t be surprised if some showed up today or tomorrow.
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Hayabusa-2 has moved to within 23 miles of the asteroid Ryugu and is expected to reach its planned 12 mile rendezvous distance on June 27.
No new pictures, though I wouldn’t be surprised if some showed up today or tomorrow.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Is it just me, or is anyone else amazed that we can place something so accurately (from this distance) that it’s in orbit TWELVE MILES (!) from the surface of another celestial body?
Col Beausabre asked: “Is it just me, or is anyone else amazed that we can place something so accurately (from this distance) that it’s in orbit TWELVE MILES (!) from the surface of another celestial body?”
Well, they make midcourse corrections, so I lost my amazement decades ago.
On the other hand, some of the mathematics is simple (elliptical orbits) and some is complex (three dimensional differential equations for rendezvous). Plus the spacecraft has to perform correctly after years of aging electronics, radiation bombardment, whatever the limit is for the batteries, and other surprises that come up (Mars Observer failed during a routine midcourse correction on the way to Mars).
Then there are communication time delays, the unknowns of the destination asteroid (is there debris in the neighborhood?), and changes of plan during arrival because something interesting came up. Changes in the plan are risky, as preset commands may be missed during the changes (SOHO was nearly lost because a previously turned off reaction wheel — changed plan — was not taken into account during a routine maneuver).
Come to think of it, there are quite a few failures that happen, so it is amazing that we have as many successes as we do.
Here is a video that helps explain how spacecraft navigate in space:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAnxt1YPWbk (17 minutes)
Col Beausabre: I am certainly amazed, even if it has happened several times already. One of the amazing things is how they even communicate with the spacecraft. How does it know where it is, after all, there is no GPS out there. See
hub.jhu.edu/2015/07/17/new-horizons-data-transmission/
for a writeup on telecommunications at the distance of Pluto.
I miss TESS. It’s supposed to make its perigee end of June right now soon (it’s so quite about it and NASA mission website doesn’t advertise when the first perigee and thus data download will happen). I don’t know how many exoplanet detections it is expected to have gathered on its first run, but in two years it will have found tens of times more exoplanets than are known to date. I’m surprised by the silence before the storm.
@lodaya
A press conference with scientists on the Cassini team said that they now know the location of Saturn’s center of gravity to within one mile (it is 1½ million miles away). Some press in the audience asked what that’s good for. “-Astronomers make it their job to know where things are!” Ephemera as they call it since thousands of years.
Buzz Aldrin took a PhD in astronautics, on the topic of manual visual star navigation. Just as at sea, it is necessary to know where one is and many methods have been developed to do it.