59
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Can you go over the asteroid belt rather than through it?
Yes, you could go "over" or "under" the asteroid belt. However, plane changes are expensive, and as pointed out in the comments, the asteroid belt is not very dense (average distance of 600,000 miles [...
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12
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Why wouldn't you use a star tracker in the asteroid belt?
A Star Tracker is used to determine the location and attitude of a spacecraft
Attitude, yes. For location it would need some help. Stars are too far away to use for positioning information within ...
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11
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What would be merits of placing space telescope after the asteroid belt or closer to the Kupier belt?
Very little upside, lots of downside.
It's colder out there, which means that keeping your IR sensors cool is a bit easier.
The orbit is wider, so you get more parallax, but the orbit is slower, so ...
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9
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Is Starman/Roadster in any danger in the asteroid belt?
Is Starman/Roadster in any danger of asteroid belt?
Honestly? No.
The Asteroid belt does contain lots of asteroids. But this is deep space. These things are not close together in any sense.
Think ...
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9
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Was SpaceX's venture into the asteroid belt a "convenient accident" on purpose?
It is highly likely it was known that the upper stage would could be overshot into the asteroid belt, but it may be within the upper-bounds of expectations.
The reason for this is that Elon commented ...
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Can you go over the asteroid belt rather than through it?
Purely propulsive plane changes are expensive, but a much smaller adjustment followed by a swing-by maneuver over the pole of a planet a bit like Voyager 1 did at Saturn, (which in this case I guess ...
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8
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Resources on 129 Antigone
tl;dr: There's a fair bit of wiggle room in density estimates, macroporosity is a thing to consider, you could still feasibly find a lot of material on this rock
I first want to clarify that asteroids ...
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4
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Can you go over the asteroid belt rather than through it?
It would be a bit like sailing your ship from Spain around the cape of Africa rather than through the Mediterranean sea to get to Egypt just because you were worried you may hit off Malta or Sicily.
...
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4
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Outer planet trajectory design versus the asteroid belt
I cannot give you a valid answer for later Missions, but here something about Pioneer and Voyager:
As Scientists discover there is a very rare planet constellation in the 70/80ies allowing to pass ...
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3
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Does the asteroid belt orbit the sun?
Individual asteroids in the belt orbit the sun, each on a slightly different path. The positions of the asteroids relative to one another is continuously shifting, because the further out an orbit is, ...
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3
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Is Starman/Roadster in any danger in the asteroid belt?
As Simba's answer explained, the probability of a spacecraft accidentally colliding with an asteroid is very low. On average, asteroids in the Main Belt are hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart. ...
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2
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How does one spacecraft best visit multiple asteroids?
CASTAway (PDF) is a mission proposed for ESA that would flyby 10 asteroids in the Main Belt and observe tens thousands telescopically to determine their composition.
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Does the asteroid belt orbit the sun?
Yes, the asteroid belt does indeed orbit the sun.
Not quite sure how the asteroids would stay out there if they were not in orbit. Some individual asteroids are not in the belt however.
From http://...
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Was SpaceX's venture into the asteroid belt a "convenient accident" on purpose?
There is no way to power any 'prospecting equipment'. The batteries on the stage are dead already, and there are no solar panels on board. Also, no equipment is visible in the prelaunch photos.
The ...
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Was SpaceX's venture into the asteroid belt a "convenient accident" on purpose?
I've used the plotting of the Horizons projection described in this answer to show the distance between the Roadster and Mars out to 2030. The projection is likely to be slightly revised as future ...
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Can small asteroids in the asteroid belt be detected on the fly and how much of a threat do they represent for a human manned space mission there?
The orbital speed of Mars is about 24 km/sec or ~ 2 million km/day, and so relative velocity to an asteroid could be fairly slow for one in a similar orbit, or easily 1 million km/day or more for one ...
- 149k
2
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What were the challenges of an exploration mission to Trojan asteroids?
The first asteroid flyby missions were secondary missions: on its way to Jupiter, Galileo flew by a few asteroids that were close to its trajectory to Jupiter.
The first mission that changed its ...
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What would be merits of placing space telescope after the asteroid belt or closer to the Kupier belt?
I don't see the down sides to be anywhere nearly as strong as @JamesK's answer suggests!
Some space telescopes use several kW of power but one of them is 500 W and these are all circa 1 AU where ...
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Can sunlight be utilised as a mining "laser drill"?
To melt your asteroid you need heat. A lot of heat. But the sun is very hot (1.57×10^7 Kelvin, according to wikipedia); the sun is also roundish, so you can't really focus all of that heat, but it's ...
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Can you go over the asteroid belt rather than through it?
The asteroid belt ranges from 2.2 to 3.2 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun and is 1 AU thick, see. So it is a very long way to go over it and too much fuel would be necessary. All the very ...
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