[AR] Re: Catching Oumuamua
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2021 00:29:26 -0500 (EST)
On Fri, 26 Feb 2021, George Herbert wrote:
I had been working on this on and off; I need better software custom
written for tight Jupiter passes but a two-solid-motor stack with a
Castor 30 and Star 48BV and a copy of New Horizons, fired at close
perijove in a oberth maneuver gravity assist maneuver approximately
worked.
Unfortunately, a New Horizons clone probably would not survive a close
perijove. NH would have liked a closer Jupiter gravity assist than the
one they actually used -- closest approach was 2.3Mkm! -- but couldn't
handle the radiation dose without specialized extra-rad-hard electronics,
which were out of reach for a cost-constrained mission. As it was,
despite having an RTG aboard (and not out on a long boom, either), most of
the radiation dose to the electronics was at Jupiter.
The radiation environment of a close perijove gets really ugly.
Henry
P.S. I do plan to respond in more detail to some of the other posts in
this thread, but didn't find time for it this weekend. Soon, I hope.
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