It's somewhat unfortunate that Jupiter is by far the most useful Oberth
body, the Sun taking so many flybys to line up with currently that it's
hard to use for these.
-george
On Tue, Mar 2, 2021 at 8:44 PM Rand Simberg <simberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As someone who worked on JIMO, Jupiter is an extreme case, compared to
the Kuiper Belt...
On 3/2/21 8:04 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Mon, 1 Mar 2021, George Herbert wrote:
...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.
If we actually want to catch ’Oumuamua the electronics should be
swapped for rad hard but the rest of the design modified as little as
possible; we don’t have a lot of time to futz around qualifying
hardware.
With the caveat that it's not something I've paid close attention to,
I fear you're badly underestimating what "swapped for rad hard"
involves. As I understand it, for close encounters with Jupiter, we're
not talking ordinary off-the-shelf rad-hard. E.g., I would expect the
instruments to need major redesign -- and quite substantial mass
growth -- to accommodate adequate shielding for their detectors. (I
was once told that the Galileo orbiter's imager CCD sat inside a cube
of tantalum, looking through an inch-thick window of special glass.)
Henry