Timeline for Flying fuel tanks! Which deep-space spacecraft had the largest fuel mass fraction?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
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| Aug 10 at 1:06 | comment | added | uhoh | It seems that JUICE may belong way up there near the top of your list, both by propellant mass, and fraction of total. | |
| Jun 28, 2021 at 7:03 | comment | added | JanKanis | I'm guessing it's not so much about how much propellant a probe needs, but more about how much propellant a probe can take, given the capabilities of the launch vehicle and the chosen trajectory. For Cassini at least, the end of mission was dictated by the available fuel reserves, and I guess that also holds for many other orbiters. | |
| Feb 5, 2021 at 3:50 | comment | added | uhoh | I'm getting 39% for Dawn using numbers from Dawn: $$\frac{1,217.7 - 747.1}{1,217.7} = 0.386$$ | |
| Dec 6, 2018 at 3:10 | comment | added | Joshua | @LocalFluff: Polyus had to do its own circlization burn, which it failed to do, resulting an a reentry before completing one orbit. | |
| Sep 26, 2017 at 13:33 | vote | accept | uhoh | ||
| Sep 15, 2017 at 12:16 | comment | added | Russell Borogove | @LocalFluff OP asked for deep space craft; Polyus doesn't qualify. I also can't find detailed mass specifications for it, but it would surprise me if it had more than 25% propellant mass ratio. | |
| Sep 15, 2017 at 7:28 | comment | added | LocalFluff | @RussellBorogove Should be anti anti-ICBM-satellite satellite, to be clear. And the @ to you Russell. | |
| Sep 15, 2017 at 7:22 | comment | added | LocalFluff | What about Polyus, the Soviet military anti-anti-ICBM satellite that was launched on Energia in 1987? It had a launch mass of 80 tons and must've been the most massive spacecraft to ever have orbited Earth, in one launch. I guess most of that was fuel for maneuvering. | |
| Sep 15, 2017 at 2:37 | history | edited | Russell Borogove | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 15, 2017 at 2:31 | comment | added | Russell Borogove | It's not so much the gravity assist as the launcher upper stage (often a Centaur or Fregat) that's getting you to your target. It's still very surprising to me that the Mars/Venus orbiters are so fuel-fat. | |
| Sep 15, 2017 at 2:12 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | I'm also surprised, I would have thought capture at Jupiter was the most expensive mission. | |
| Sep 15, 2017 at 1:51 | comment | added | uhoh | This is amazing, and absolutely contrary to what I initially expected, but in hind sight it make sense. I had thought that the farther the craft, the higher fuel fraction. But of course it's usually gravitational assists (and time) that are used for distance, and fuel is used for capture and subsequent orbital maneuvers. This puts MAVEN and MOM at the top and New Horizons at the bottom of this compilation, even though New Horizons is of order 30x farther from the sun. | |
| Sep 14, 2017 at 19:46 | history | edited | Russell Borogove | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 14, 2017 at 19:39 | history | edited | Russell Borogove | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 14, 2017 at 19:31 | history | edited | Russell Borogove | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 14, 2017 at 19:21 | history | edited | Russell Borogove | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 14, 2017 at 19:15 | history | edited | Russell Borogove | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 14, 2017 at 19:09 | history | edited | Russell Borogove | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 14, 2017 at 19:03 | history | answered | Russell Borogove | CC BY-SA 3.0 |