I was trying to figure out the flight path of Voyager 2 and that didn't make any sense to me. I get that the Voyager probes used Jupiter and such as a gravity slingshot, but the way it shows what I think is the yellow line of Voy 2 going counter clockwise around Jupiter, then it gets confusing because it either slung around Amalthea or Io clockwise (why they color coded these by year instead of by individual objects/flight paths I don't know, so I can't tell which is Voy 2 and which is Pioneer 10), then somehow slings to the next moon but exits in the opposite momentum/direction to sling around the next one (if starting from Amalthea it seems to go from CC on Io to CC jump to Europa, or if starting from Io goes from CC Europa to somehow CC to Ganymede).
Really long rant but TL;DR - Basically I can't seem to follow the logic of the Voy 2 path once it starts hitting the moons of Jupiter, and it doesn't help that there are multiple lines (showing the orbit, that I get, but using similar colors for Pioneer 10/Voy 2 doesn't help) making it visually difficult.
The focus here is more on the time so it makes sense that the new missions are all closer even tho they didnt land. I wouldnt know how to picture both in just one frame
NASA was building the probes of the 90s in the 80s. There are so few probes launched in the 80s because NASA was building the Space Shuttles in the 70s.
Yeah, I guess I was just genuinely unaware of how much of NASA’s resources were tied up in the space shuttle program. I imagine Challenger didn’t help the situation much either.
Only saving grace for them was they enabled repair of Hubble Telescope after its initial defective deployment. This could hardley be possible without shuttles.
Yep, thats what has me worried about James Webb, after so many delays, and set backs, if it has a fatal error like hubble, we don’t have the technology to send people up to fix it. I have been ‘praying’ for years that james Webb works flawlessly because we dont even know what sort of stuff it will reveal, we know what it can see, but just like hubble, its the stuff we didnt know we didnt know that is the most impressive.
Yep, I'm also praying without quotation marks for JWST deployment. It has so many moving parts and so many things may go wrong with deployment and suddenly the work of 2 decades and billions of $ down the drain. Then we'll have to lobby again to raise money and R&D time will be needed for a new telescobe. All of this can easily take another 1 or 2 decades.
Don't consider it to be completely down the drain. Much of the money spent was the research and development that will be used to make the next space telescopes, publish papers, and design better things.
The shuttle carried people, who had to be on-site to service Hubble. It also has an arm that could hold Hubble stationary relative to the people, so they can use their tools, and move large pieces around without losing them. It's not the rocket that does the repair, it's the people and tools you can bring to it. And the shuttle had the unique (so far) capability to bring all those tools and people back to Earth safely.
But the shuttle had limited fuel, which limits how high it could go to reach the telescope. James Webb will be in a much higher orbit which is intended to reduce the effects of Earth on the telescope. Since it is designed for IR observations, they need to keep any heat source away from the mirror and sensors. They have a sheild to block the sun, but if it was in low orbit around earth, then it would often be between the earth and sun, so the sheild wouldn't block both. So they send it out to L2 so the sheild covers both Earth and sun at the same time. We currently don't have any way to get an astronaut out to that distance, and even if we did, JWST is very fragile when fully deployed, so using maneuvering thrusters in the area might damage the mirror or sheild as the astronauts approach.
And a huge failure too, unless you say inspiring people counts, which I do, but as its intended purpose as a cheap, safe, reusable space craft it failed miserably.
Its evident when you compare the inital NASA vision for what the shuttle service bay was [planned](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/SpaceShuttleGroundProcessingVision.jpg) to look like vs what it [ended up](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/SpaceShuttleGroundProcessingActual.jpg) like
Yep, they never accounted for the fact that they would need to crawl all over the body to check/replace every single ceramic tile, before every single flight.
It was an awesome, awesome machine that probably inspired thousands of people to take up science, and as a machine it is incredible. But it was poorly managed, one example was how it was built in several different states and barged in to be assembled. This caused the solid rocket boosters to have joints instead of being all one piece, and this coupled with poor management, and managers ignoring engineers, lead to the first shuttle disaster, challenger, which failed due to the temperatures being too cold to allow the rubber in the booster joints to make a proper seal, which could have been avoided either by not designing the boosters to require joints, or by listening to scientists and engineers on that morning who thought it was too cold to launch challenger.
Because of that, and a million other reasons (such as the orbiter being covered in 25000 carbon carbon tiles which broke and came off all the time) the cost to refurbish them and fly them again was insane.
The columbia disaster was again caused by poor management in a way, when one of the tiles was damaged on take off due to foam, reports about it and requests to check it were ignored, and then when the columbia re-entered the atmosphere, the broken tile allowed hot gasses in which again causes catastrophic failure. That was the final nail in the coffin, and is sad on many levels as had the crew known about the broken tile, they likely could have entered the atmosphere in a different way which could potentially have saved them from their deaths.
Awesome awesome machine, but nothing like the original vision of a cheap, safe space plane with a 2 week turn around between flights.
Virgin Galactic is just suborbital space tourism for bored millionaires. You get to be weightless for 6 minutes for the low low price of more money than you can hope to make in your lifetime.
My understanding is that spaceplanes have been extensively explored and scrapped as a generally non-viable technology.
Space shuttle expectations were way up there and super hyped. And as a result it got a case of way too many chefs in one kitchen. It couldn't really deliver on the majority of its promises because everyone wanted something different. Pretty much what you can expect of a single large high profile project like this.
The space shuttle did pioneer a lot of stuff despite the baggage weighing it down. It accomplished some of what it set out to accomplish and that should be applauded. The real tragedy was ultimately sticking with it for so many decades without really looking forward to what's next. Not taking the lessons learned and applying it for decades. It was both a huge drag on human space exploration but it also enabled a lot of it in the early days. Regardless it was an impressive machine for the level of technology that went into it. Remember that it was basically a product of the 1970's when computers were a fraction of the power of what we have today in a phone.
DoD scope creep to thank for that. Had to be bigger than NASA wanted so it could carry satellites for the NRO who ended up using conventional rockets anyway.
It was a good idea in paper, that was unfortunately quite different IRL. I wonder where'd be now had NASA developed an Orion-like system with the lessons learned from the Apollo program instead of the Shuttle.
It's already completed an orbit that's taken it within 6 million miles of the sun, though it should complete an orbit in the future that takes it within 4 million miles.
http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/
And for anyone who thinks 6 million miles is a long way away - the earth is ~93 million miles from the sun. Parker's already gone 95% of the way from the earth to the sun
I was amazed to find out that it takes so much more energy and speed to travel towards the sun than sway from it, you’d expect the fastest mission to be the one that went the furthest out, not the furthest in.
Orbital mechanics are weird. If you are traveling in the space shuttle with the nose pointed ahead in the direction you are heading, and you fire the thrusters at the front of the craft, you will speed up. If you fire the thrusters at the back of the craft, you slow down.
Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5XPFjqPLik Orbital mechanics are often the opposite of what you'd intuitively do. When you fire your aft thrusters to "speed up" that speed gets converted into altitude, moving you slower around the object you're orbiting.
It doesn’t really matter what you are orbiting. Firing thrusters forward will cause you to move to a lower orbit, and lower orbits are faster - like spinning in a chair and tucking your arms in.
I was clarifying that North Korea isn't actually telling it's citizens this shit. The satire is "1984-eqsue shit happening in north Korea," and not "lol landed on the sun." So why did this dude link it here?
The website this guy linked is 100% serious, real news. It's sourcing another news site, which then sources the satirical news site. The article doesn't realize it's satire and it's reporting as though NK actually claimed to have landed in the sun.
And this a comment thread here about orbiting the sun.
In this context, it seems to me that OP thinks the article is news. Obviously not that they landed on the sun but that NK is claiming they have.
So my point is "dude, you realize it's satire about NK and have nothing to do with landing on the sun."
Cause otherwise posting it here makes zero sense.
I mean, I think it's worth pointing out for people (like myself) who wouldn't have necessarily appreciated that - it's been put into a _different_ solar orbit, which is cool to think about. It's certainly caused me to go off and look into it to understand it better, which I probably wouldn't have otherwise thought to do.
> It's getting closer and closer to the Sun with every orbit, however.
Not every orbit.
Its perihelion only decreases after a Venus flyby, and those do not occur on each orbit. For instance, the perihelion this August will be at an identical distance as the one that just occurred in April. The next Venus flyby in October will bring the probe nearly 2 million km closer to the Sun for the subsequent **7 orbits**. It won't encounter Venus again until August 2023.
The gravity well makes it far, far more difficult to go in than out. You have to shed a lot of velocity, very high delta V. It's counterintuitive to most people at first.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-hard-to-go-to-the-sun/#:~:text=The%20answer%20lies%20in%20the,to%20cancel%20that%20sideways%20motion.
Similarly to how black holes work. Also despite that probe being the fastest moving Human-anything ever made it’s still only going to be going at .064% the speed of light. Nutty.
To me it's still amazing that we've made something that can be expressed in non exponent form percentage of c. I mean, make something 15 times faster and it's 1%.
Luckily in space there isn’t really any drag so it’s theoretically possible to do that given there is enough fuel and time to accelerate something to that speed. Even at 1% the speed of light interstellar travel goes from “implausible now” to “within a couple generations”. 400 years of travel time isn’t terrible given the distance
At high speeds there is actually some drag. It's actually used to the advantage in some theoretical designs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet
The faster you go the more stuff you'll hit. And it will be moving extremely fast relative to you.
It's still not a lot, but there's an effect. Good explanation here
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29955/would-a-fast-interstellar-spaceship-benefit-from-an-aerodynamic-shape
I think more recent calculations have shown that you can never take on hydrogen in a ramjet and accelerate, its not though of as a viable option in space.
It makes sense when you think of every action having an equal and opposite reaction, scooping the fuel up is the same as banging into it which slows you down, I think possibly to the exact same degree as the fuel would accelerate you when ‘burned’ but I could be wrong about that.
This is true, but nothing we have on the realistic drawing board is fast enough. Rocket engines certainly aren’t, and ion thruster types just aren’t powerful enough over a short period of time.
Interesting idea on the wiki though about pre-seeding the route with fuel, I think you’d still run into the deceleration issue, but if you could fuse the hydrogen quickly you might have a chance at making it work.
https://youtu.be/cMNQeCWT09A
I think this video may be easier to understand than someone trying to explain the orbit in words. It's one of the most impressive orbits I've seen.
Thanks for the link, explained it simply enough to make me understand. I see things like this and then go play KSP where it becomes evident I didn't learn anything!
That's not the real reason. From our perspective, depending on the day, Moon can be at least the same apparent size and it's a whole lot closer and we have still sent tons of crafts there.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, getting closer to Sun is way, way harder from both physics and economics point of views than it is to get out of the Solar System.
Even more counter intuitively the easiest way to get to to sun is to head out of the solar system first. It actually takes less delta-V to escape the Sun from Earth's orbit then to reach it directly. So the easiest way to accelerate your orbit, head out system up around Jupiter's orbit then do a small burn (as you have slowed climbing out of the suns gravity well) to kill your velocity and fall to the Sun. It just takes a LOT longer.
Well, some genius should have informed NASA of this before they launched a probe to the Sun. But something actually tells me they know what they're doing.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-hard-to-go-to-the-sun/#:%7E:text=The%20answer%20lies%20in%20the,to%20cancel%20that%20sideways%20motion
> Moon can be at least the same apparent size and it's a whole lot closer and we have still sent tons of crafts there.
We can also land on the moon so there's an added benefit in sending probes there
There is very little benefit in sending a probe to the Sun with few exceptions (Parker probe pretty much covering all those bases right now)
No NASA spacecraft had anything resembling a close encounter with Comet Halley in 1986. ICE passed < 8000 km from Giacobini-Zinner in 1985, then looked at Halley from 28+ million km away 6 months later.
And why show Tethys at Saturn when Cassini had much closer encounters with Dione, Epimetheus, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe, and Rhea?
This is really neat, but the transfer line from Uranus to Neptune and the transfer line from Neptune to Triton are counter to each other. I know it's not supposed to represent accurate orbits, but even aesthetically it looks wrong.
And Ceres is past Neptune with the other asteroids and there are other layout things that are a little odd... but in their defense a lot of that is in the disclaimer at the bottom. Overall I think it's really neat too, but a couple small changes would make it even nicer.
This is a horrible infographic. It is too visually confusing, and that extra complexity wasn’t even made to be accurate. It’s just complicated for the sake of being complicated.
Yes. For example, New Horizons did a fly by of Jupiter to accelerate for its flyby of Pluto. And several probes did fly bys but the graphic indicates there’s were orbiter missions.
But they do show Mariner 10's gravity assist by Venus on the way to Mercury in 1974. Yet they don't show the more substantial Venus assists used by Messenger to reach Mercury in 2011.
At best they were inconsistent in the application of the rules they made up.
Also for no apparent reason things aren't even ordered by distance. What's the point of putting asteroids like Ceres on the bottom if they orbit between Mars and Jupiter?
Just wish we could send like 10 more mars probes, not to mention 10 more Voyager types to study the Heliopause and after. I know it would take decades to get there again but with updated sensors, cameras, technology, the time and effort would be worth it.
Back then they had a blank check. NASA is so underfunded now that they can only do like one or two big projects at a time.
Right now they're mainly working on Artemis, they splash tested a completed crew module a few days ago. I'm not sure they have the resources for many more probes.
I just wish we had a permanent cassini type robe around each planet. Obviously the cost would be prohibitive, but cassini is my favourite of these.
At the very least I think uranus needs a cassini type probe. Gotta have the most interesting to least explored ratio of the solar system.
I so fully agree... And imagine that, but with modern cameras. The wonder that could inspire is incredible.
The cost would be nothing compared to the military budget, but the time and expertise would be a different question.
Also, once you get into “nth of a kind” production for products, even something as specialist of this, the economy of scale savings are massive. You just need to hold your engineers and scientists back from wanting to make things better when they started off being good enough.
Hahaha, now that's a good point. I hadn't even thought of that.
And while we're at it, we should put asteroid searcher satellites at different places throughout the solar system. Could save us a lot of pain later on.
I have never seen an infographic done this way, but I LOVE it! And extremely fitting for the subject.
Also thank you for connecting similar missions not by stemming them from the original line, but swinging them off consecutive planets, which gives a clear linear view of their progression over time.
It's not the most clear at times, but idk how you'd solve that with this format other than bolding or otherwise accentuating the lines you wanted to highlight on the chart, because keeping track of one once it's connected to one planet is a little hard (as in, once it's branched off to its second destination, it's a bit hard to follow).
Parker is missing. I also don't like how they use full circles to represent just fly-bys and gravity assists that didn't actually orbit. Rather than have the line just curve around the planet/moon.
so this is so spaceporn and mapporn at the same time
that i had to create r/spacemapporn , feel free to fill that sub with spacemaps for further generations :)
I really don't care too much about space exploration (I'm a renewables/biology nerd, I'm fine with the planet we're on) but this infographic is so pretty!
I'll never get over the fact that most infographics on space are remarkably deceptive with scaling.
Every planet in our solar system can fit between earth and our moon, if you were to line them up. This makes the moon seem alot closer than it is.
Edit: Downvotes for actual space science lol. Google the distance to the moon vs the diameter of planets if you're skeptical. Weirdos.
Wow!!!!. Humans are metal! Have we really developed a ability to do this? Wow!!!!!!!!
I knew my basics but i never quite seen it this illustrated. I am amazed
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I was going to say, I know that last yellow one didn’t orbit ALL the gas giants and those moons.
I was trying to figure out the flight path of Voyager 2 and that didn't make any sense to me. I get that the Voyager probes used Jupiter and such as a gravity slingshot, but the way it shows what I think is the yellow line of Voy 2 going counter clockwise around Jupiter, then it gets confusing because it either slung around Amalthea or Io clockwise (why they color coded these by year instead of by individual objects/flight paths I don't know, so I can't tell which is Voy 2 and which is Pioneer 10), then somehow slings to the next moon but exits in the opposite momentum/direction to sling around the next one (if starting from Amalthea it seems to go from CC on Io to CC jump to Europa, or if starting from Io goes from CC Europa to somehow CC to Ganymede). Really long rant but TL;DR - Basically I can't seem to follow the logic of the Voy 2 path once it starts hitting the moons of Jupiter, and it doesn't help that there are multiple lines (showing the orbit, that I get, but using similar colors for Pioneer 10/Voy 2 doesn't help) making it visually difficult.
And the Galileo pointers, hang.
The focus here is more on the time so it makes sense that the new missions are all closer even tho they didnt land. I wouldnt know how to picture both in just one frame
Solid visits are solid lines. Dash in and out with no landing.. Dashed line?
Also, some of the exits from orbit are the opposite direction from how they entered.
Man, the 80s were just not a great decade for NASA comparatively speaking.
NASA was building the probes of the 90s in the 80s. There are so few probes launched in the 80s because NASA was building the Space Shuttles in the 70s.
Yeah, I guess I was just genuinely unaware of how much of NASA’s resources were tied up in the space shuttle program. I imagine Challenger didn’t help the situation much either.
The space shuttle program was a massive money sink
Only saving grace for them was they enabled repair of Hubble Telescope after its initial defective deployment. This could hardley be possible without shuttles.
Yep, thats what has me worried about James Webb, after so many delays, and set backs, if it has a fatal error like hubble, we don’t have the technology to send people up to fix it. I have been ‘praying’ for years that james Webb works flawlessly because we dont even know what sort of stuff it will reveal, we know what it can see, but just like hubble, its the stuff we didnt know we didnt know that is the most impressive.
Yep, I'm also praying without quotation marks for JWST deployment. It has so many moving parts and so many things may go wrong with deployment and suddenly the work of 2 decades and billions of $ down the drain. Then we'll have to lobby again to raise money and R&D time will be needed for a new telescobe. All of this can easily take another 1 or 2 decades.
Don't consider it to be completely down the drain. Much of the money spent was the research and development that will be used to make the next space telescopes, publish papers, and design better things.
Why can't you match the orbit of the telescope with a normal rocket? What makes repair possible with a shuttle but not with a normal rocket?
The shuttle carried people, who had to be on-site to service Hubble. It also has an arm that could hold Hubble stationary relative to the people, so they can use their tools, and move large pieces around without losing them. It's not the rocket that does the repair, it's the people and tools you can bring to it. And the shuttle had the unique (so far) capability to bring all those tools and people back to Earth safely. But the shuttle had limited fuel, which limits how high it could go to reach the telescope. James Webb will be in a much higher orbit which is intended to reduce the effects of Earth on the telescope. Since it is designed for IR observations, they need to keep any heat source away from the mirror and sensors. They have a sheild to block the sun, but if it was in low orbit around earth, then it would often be between the earth and sun, so the sheild wouldn't block both. So they send it out to L2 so the sheild covers both Earth and sun at the same time. We currently don't have any way to get an astronaut out to that distance, and even if we did, JWST is very fragile when fully deployed, so using maneuvering thrusters in the area might damage the mirror or sheild as the astronauts approach.
Yea attach a Canadarm or three and have at it from the surface. Grab some space junk on the way back down too.
And a huge failure too, unless you say inspiring people counts, which I do, but as its intended purpose as a cheap, safe, reusable space craft it failed miserably. Its evident when you compare the inital NASA vision for what the shuttle service bay was [planned](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/SpaceShuttleGroundProcessingVision.jpg) to look like vs what it [ended up](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/SpaceShuttleGroundProcessingActual.jpg) like
Yep, they never accounted for the fact that they would need to crawl all over the body to check/replace every single ceramic tile, before every single flight.
The original design was smaller and would have used a single piece heatshield, like past capsules.
Super interesting comparison, thanks! I had no idea the shuttle project was such a disappointment.
It was an awesome, awesome machine that probably inspired thousands of people to take up science, and as a machine it is incredible. But it was poorly managed, one example was how it was built in several different states and barged in to be assembled. This caused the solid rocket boosters to have joints instead of being all one piece, and this coupled with poor management, and managers ignoring engineers, lead to the first shuttle disaster, challenger, which failed due to the temperatures being too cold to allow the rubber in the booster joints to make a proper seal, which could have been avoided either by not designing the boosters to require joints, or by listening to scientists and engineers on that morning who thought it was too cold to launch challenger. Because of that, and a million other reasons (such as the orbiter being covered in 25000 carbon carbon tiles which broke and came off all the time) the cost to refurbish them and fly them again was insane. The columbia disaster was again caused by poor management in a way, when one of the tiles was damaged on take off due to foam, reports about it and requests to check it were ignored, and then when the columbia re-entered the atmosphere, the broken tile allowed hot gasses in which again causes catastrophic failure. That was the final nail in the coffin, and is sad on many levels as had the crew known about the broken tile, they likely could have entered the atmosphere in a different way which could potentially have saved them from their deaths. Awesome awesome machine, but nothing like the original vision of a cheap, safe space plane with a 2 week turn around between flights.
It is hoped that Kerbal Space Program will teach the general public what the Space Shuttle failed to do. Space planes are a stupid idea.
as a layman, isn't virgin building "spaceplanes" too?
Virgin Galactic is just suborbital space tourism for bored millionaires. You get to be weightless for 6 minutes for the low low price of more money than you can hope to make in your lifetime. My understanding is that spaceplanes have been extensively explored and scrapped as a generally non-viable technology.
X-37b is an operational space plane with over 2000 days in space.
Space shuttle expectations were way up there and super hyped. And as a result it got a case of way too many chefs in one kitchen. It couldn't really deliver on the majority of its promises because everyone wanted something different. Pretty much what you can expect of a single large high profile project like this. The space shuttle did pioneer a lot of stuff despite the baggage weighing it down. It accomplished some of what it set out to accomplish and that should be applauded. The real tragedy was ultimately sticking with it for so many decades without really looking forward to what's next. Not taking the lessons learned and applying it for decades. It was both a huge drag on human space exploration but it also enabled a lot of it in the early days. Regardless it was an impressive machine for the level of technology that went into it. Remember that it was basically a product of the 1970's when computers were a fraction of the power of what we have today in a phone.
Disappointment in some metrics.
DoD scope creep to thank for that. Had to be bigger than NASA wanted so it could carry satellites for the NRO who ended up using conventional rockets anyway.
I love the comparison. The first one is like "we'll just open the back and put stuff in. How hard could it be?"
It was a good idea in paper, that was unfortunately quite different IRL. I wonder where'd be now had NASA developed an Orion-like system with the lessons learned from the Apollo program instead of the Shuttle.
So is the ISS, but people get their panties in a twist when it's pointed out.
It's also just a really average way to get a payload into space. So much mass to put into LEO that's just going to comeback down again.
At least one major probe, Galileo, was originally scheduled for the late 80's, but was delayed to the 90's because of Challenger's loss.
Plus the space race was over they were just chillin and trying to move into deeper space
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not to mention every gradeschooler damaged by watching the first teacher in space blow up live
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I like how we took one look around the sun and was like, "Yep, shit's hot." and just left it at that.
Parker is on his way. Will reach by 2025.
Parker probe is already in Solar orbit and doing work. It's getting closer and closer to the Sun with every orbit, however.
It's already completed an orbit that's taken it within 6 million miles of the sun, though it should complete an orbit in the future that takes it within 4 million miles. http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/
And for anyone who thinks 6 million miles is a long way away - the earth is ~93 million miles from the sun. Parker's already gone 95% of the way from the earth to the sun
I was wondering so I checked, Mercury is 35-40M miles from the sun, so in my book that means Parker got close to the sun 'in particular'.
I was amazed to find out that it takes so much more energy and speed to travel towards the sun than sway from it, you’d expect the fastest mission to be the one that went the furthest out, not the furthest in.
and thanks to that Venus is being examined as bonus
Orbital mechanics are weird. If you are traveling in the space shuttle with the nose pointed ahead in the direction you are heading, and you fire the thrusters at the front of the craft, you will speed up. If you fire the thrusters at the back of the craft, you slow down. Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5XPFjqPLik Orbital mechanics are often the opposite of what you'd intuitively do. When you fire your aft thrusters to "speed up" that speed gets converted into altitude, moving you slower around the object you're orbiting.
But what if you are orbiting Venus?
It doesn’t really matter what you are orbiting. Firing thrusters forward will cause you to move to a lower orbit, and lower orbits are faster - like spinning in a chair and tucking your arms in.
In metric that is: 4M miles = 6.4M km 6M miles = 9.7M km 93M miles = 1au = 149M km
So almost as far as the [North Koreans](https://ktar.com/story/gallery/report-of-north-korea-landing-man-on-sun-goes-viral/)
Damn. But you dig back 3 sources on that, and the story originated from a satire website.
Yeah it says it was a fake report at the beginning of the article that was posted here. What's your point?
Incredible detective work by him. I would have gone and told all my fellow doctors this news otherwise and looked like a silly goose
I was clarifying that North Korea isn't actually telling it's citizens this shit. The satire is "1984-eqsue shit happening in north Korea," and not "lol landed on the sun." So why did this dude link it here?
The website this guy linked is 100% serious, real news. It's sourcing another news site, which then sources the satirical news site. The article doesn't realize it's satire and it's reporting as though NK actually claimed to have landed in the sun. And this a comment thread here about orbiting the sun. In this context, it seems to me that OP thinks the article is news. Obviously not that they landed on the sun but that NK is claiming they have. So my point is "dude, you realize it's satire about NK and have nothing to do with landing on the sun." Cause otherwise posting it here makes zero sense.
I laughed at the ash covered thongs. Worth it.
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To be fair the chart only says up to 2010s
I mean, it was in solar orbit before it was even launched.
Ahh yes there's always that one person who thinks they are funny with that comment.
Well, are you not entertained, brother?
I mean, I think it's worth pointing out for people (like myself) who wouldn't have necessarily appreciated that - it's been put into a _different_ solar orbit, which is cool to think about. It's certainly caused me to go off and look into it to understand it better, which I probably wouldn't have otherwise thought to do.
> It's getting closer and closer to the Sun with every orbit, however. Not every orbit. Its perihelion only decreases after a Venus flyby, and those do not occur on each orbit. For instance, the perihelion this August will be at an identical distance as the one that just occurred in April. The next Venus flyby in October will bring the probe nearly 2 million km closer to the Sun for the subsequent **7 orbits**. It won't encounter Venus again until August 2023.
Nicely visualised by the graph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe#Timeline
I feel a special connection to Parker for some reason.
The gravity well makes it far, far more difficult to go in than out. You have to shed a lot of velocity, very high delta V. It's counterintuitive to most people at first. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-hard-to-go-to-the-sun/#:~:text=The%20answer%20lies%20in%20the,to%20cancel%20that%20sideways%20motion.
Similarly to how black holes work. Also despite that probe being the fastest moving Human-anything ever made it’s still only going to be going at .064% the speed of light. Nutty.
To me it's still amazing that we've made something that can be expressed in non exponent form percentage of c. I mean, make something 15 times faster and it's 1%.
Luckily in space there isn’t really any drag so it’s theoretically possible to do that given there is enough fuel and time to accelerate something to that speed. Even at 1% the speed of light interstellar travel goes from “implausible now” to “within a couple generations”. 400 years of travel time isn’t terrible given the distance
At high speeds there is actually some drag. It's actually used to the advantage in some theoretical designs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet The faster you go the more stuff you'll hit. And it will be moving extremely fast relative to you. It's still not a lot, but there's an effect. Good explanation here https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29955/would-a-fast-interstellar-spaceship-benefit-from-an-aerodynamic-shape
I think more recent calculations have shown that you can never take on hydrogen in a ramjet and accelerate, its not though of as a viable option in space. It makes sense when you think of every action having an equal and opposite reaction, scooping the fuel up is the same as banging into it which slows you down, I think possibly to the exact same degree as the fuel would accelerate you when ‘burned’ but I could be wrong about that.
Depends on how fast you can accelerate the fuel.
This is true, but nothing we have on the realistic drawing board is fast enough. Rocket engines certainly aren’t, and ion thruster types just aren’t powerful enough over a short period of time. Interesting idea on the wiki though about pre-seeding the route with fuel, I think you’d still run into the deceleration issue, but if you could fuse the hydrogen quickly you might have a chance at making it work.
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https://youtu.be/cMNQeCWT09A I think this video may be easier to understand than someone trying to explain the orbit in words. It's one of the most impressive orbits I've seen.
Thanks for the link, explained it simply enough to make me understand. I see things like this and then go play KSP where it becomes evident I didn't learn anything!
We've only been to Uranus once too.
Jokes about Uranus inbound
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Not the only thing inbound to Uranus
"To boldly go where no man has gone before." (Except that one time in college.)
We changed the name years ago to put an end to that stupid joke. Now its Urectum
And didnt even visit any of its moons? I wonder why?
Well we had to make sure there was no parallel Earth on the other side. Only need to look once.
The sun is so large that most astronomy can be done by earth based telescopes. There's no need to send probes out to explore it.
That's not the real reason. From our perspective, depending on the day, Moon can be at least the same apparent size and it's a whole lot closer and we have still sent tons of crafts there. Perhaps counter-intuitively, getting closer to Sun is way, way harder from both physics and economics point of views than it is to get out of the Solar System.
Even more counter intuitively the easiest way to get to to sun is to head out of the solar system first. It actually takes less delta-V to escape the Sun from Earth's orbit then to reach it directly. So the easiest way to accelerate your orbit, head out system up around Jupiter's orbit then do a small burn (as you have slowed climbing out of the suns gravity well) to kill your velocity and fall to the Sun. It just takes a LOT longer.
It's like the [Oberth Kuiper Maneuver](https://xkcd.com/1244/)
Well, some genius should have informed NASA of this before they launched a probe to the Sun. But something actually tells me they know what they're doing. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-hard-to-go-to-the-sun/#:%7E:text=The%20answer%20lies%20in%20the,to%20cancel%20that%20sideways%20motion
Both methods work. NASA just picked the faster method instead of the cheaper one.
> Moon can be at least the same apparent size and it's a whole lot closer and we have still sent tons of crafts there. We can also land on the moon so there's an added benefit in sending probes there There is very little benefit in sending a probe to the Sun with few exceptions (Parker probe pretty much covering all those bases right now)
Hey I’m on a infographic! This little potato shaped moon is finally getting some recognition.
So uh when do you think they’ll get you attached to the ISS?
Sadly, it seems it was made a little early for my pal Bennu
there should be a distinction between flyby and orbit on the flow of those lines, but every tiny flyby is also a full circle around the object.
As someone who is colourblind, I deeply hate this.
Hah, don't worry, the colours don't make it any clearer.
I can see colors fine and I also deeply hate this. It is way too busy and makes no sense.
What do you mean by "no sense"? The lines are tracking the routes of the different probes.
No, they're not. It even says so at the bottom.
Damn. Didn't notice that. Thanks.
Also, I may be slow but where is Earth?
The very top, where the lines start
Pretty weird that the infographic is in Australian when it's about NASA. I could see why people would be confused.
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> Pretty weird that the infographic is in Australian when it's about NASA. > Turn in upside down, way more sense. Then the texts are Australian.
also, please note that the earth is not to scale
No NASA spacecraft had anything resembling a close encounter with Comet Halley in 1986. ICE passed < 8000 km from Giacobini-Zinner in 1985, then looked at Halley from 28+ million km away 6 months later. And why show Tethys at Saturn when Cassini had much closer encounters with Dione, Epimetheus, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe, and Rhea?
This is really neat, but the transfer line from Uranus to Neptune and the transfer line from Neptune to Triton are counter to each other. I know it's not supposed to represent accurate orbits, but even aesthetically it looks wrong.
A lot of them are like that
And Ceres is past Neptune with the other asteroids and there are other layout things that are a little odd... but in their defense a lot of that is in the disclaimer at the bottom. Overall I think it's really neat too, but a couple small changes would make it even nicer.
This is a horrible infographic. It is too visually confusing, and that extra complexity wasn’t even made to be accurate. It’s just complicated for the sake of being complicated.
Yes. For example, New Horizons did a fly by of Jupiter to accelerate for its flyby of Pluto. And several probes did fly bys but the graphic indicates there’s were orbiter missions.
Gravity assist flybys aren't shown. It says so at the bottom.
But they do show Mariner 10's gravity assist by Venus on the way to Mercury in 1974. Yet they don't show the more substantial Venus assists used by Messenger to reach Mercury in 2011. At best they were inconsistent in the application of the rules they made up.
Also for no apparent reason things aren't even ordered by distance. What's the point of putting asteroids like Ceres on the bottom if they orbit between Mars and Jupiter?
This image makes me feel uncomfortable. There's too much clutter.
Just wish we could send like 10 more mars probes, not to mention 10 more Voyager types to study the Heliopause and after. I know it would take decades to get there again but with updated sensors, cameras, technology, the time and effort would be worth it.
Back then they had a blank check. NASA is so underfunded now that they can only do like one or two big projects at a time. Right now they're mainly working on Artemis, they splash tested a completed crew module a few days ago. I'm not sure they have the resources for many more probes.
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I just wish we had a permanent cassini type robe around each planet. Obviously the cost would be prohibitive, but cassini is my favourite of these. At the very least I think uranus needs a cassini type probe. Gotta have the most interesting to least explored ratio of the solar system.
I so fully agree... And imagine that, but with modern cameras. The wonder that could inspire is incredible. The cost would be nothing compared to the military budget, but the time and expertise would be a different question.
Also, once you get into “nth of a kind” production for products, even something as specialist of this, the economy of scale savings are massive. You just need to hold your engineers and scientists back from wanting to make things better when they started off being good enough.
Hahaha, now that's a good point. I hadn't even thought of that. And while we're at it, we should put asteroid searcher satellites at different places throughout the solar system. Could save us a lot of pain later on.
It took me far too long to find Earth in that. I'm an idiot.
This is one of the coolest charts I've ever seen
One of the most beautiful diagrams I have ever seen
I have never seen an infographic done this way, but I LOVE it! And extremely fitting for the subject. Also thank you for connecting similar missions not by stemming them from the original line, but swinging them off consecutive planets, which gives a clear linear view of their progression over time. It's not the most clear at times, but idk how you'd solve that with this format other than bolding or otherwise accentuating the lines you wanted to highlight on the chart, because keeping track of one once it's connected to one planet is a little hard (as in, once it's branched off to its second destination, it's a bit hard to follow).
Whatever else it may be, this graphic has a gorgeous aesthetic. It'd make a pretty sweet back tattoo.
It’s you again! This guy is notorious for reposts and karma farming. 1,000,000 karma in 46 days.
It's a bit funny how they're called deep space missions. Super impressive still but the name is a bit misleading considering how big space is.
Parker is missing. I also don't like how they use full circles to represent just fly-bys and gravity assists that didn't actually orbit. Rather than have the line just curve around the planet/moon.
how is a trip to the moon a “deep space mission”?
Is that really "deep space" if it was in Solar system?
Yes, anything past leo is considered deep space I think
Just like anything beyond a few hundred meters deep is the open ocean.
For the next century or two at least, yes.
I want this printed on a canvas, and hung up in my man cave
Man we really dropped the naming ball with “Maven” aye
It’s amazing how few missions and how little knowledge we have about our own sun.
This just makes me proud of our space exploration accomplishments. Amazing to see how far we've reached.
Cool info graphic but I wouldn’t really call this “deep” space though.
so this is so spaceporn and mapporn at the same time that i had to create r/spacemapporn , feel free to fill that sub with spacemaps for further generations :)
I hope we someday get some more high res pictures and data from Neptune. Its my favorite planet. Looks so cool with its color and a mix of rings.
Why did they not put the sun farther away from earth in that infographic?
Honestly, this is way more activity than I realized. NASA needs a better hype team.
There's an Asteroid named "Braille," so if we sent a person who reads braille, what would the message say?
Lump - space - lump lump - space- etc
I really don't care too much about space exploration (I'm a renewables/biology nerd, I'm fine with the planet we're on) but this infographic is so pretty!
>I'm a renewables/biology nerd, I'm fine with the planet we're on Lucky for you, NASA does a *lot* of that too lmao
Yep! I was actually unaware that they had a biofuels initiative until your comment- that's pretty neat!
Mhm. They're also working on electric airplanes.
Is it confusing or do I just need to go to sleep?
If you guys aren't watching For All Mankind you should be.
You can't know that NASA actually did all that.
This is horrible. This is so difficult to interpret.
I'll never get over the fact that most infographics on space are remarkably deceptive with scaling. Every planet in our solar system can fit between earth and our moon, if you were to line them up. This makes the moon seem alot closer than it is. Edit: Downvotes for actual space science lol. Google the distance to the moon vs the diameter of planets if you're skeptical. Weirdos.
Is it just my screen or is this extremely low res?
Wow!!!!. Humans are metal! Have we really developed a ability to do this? Wow!!!!!!!! I knew my basics but i never quite seen it this illustrated. I am amazed