New answers tagged voyager
28
It is not only the progress in imaging over that period. Voyager was a more ambitious and expensive mission in general. The mass of Pioneer 11 was 259 kg, while that of Voyager was 825.5. That extra mass included a proper camera with multiple lenses on a steerable platform. This is different from the Pioneer spacecraft, which were spin-stabilized. The ...
29
The 1960s and 1970s were a period of rapid technological development, so it's not actually surprising that the relatively new field of electronic imaging advanced so far in that five-year period. Especially for spacecraft applications, where you have severe power and weight constraints and a harsh operating environment, compromises had to be made in quality -...
2
I'll genericize the question to "why haven't we done X in space?"
Every space exploration agency has a rather limited budget, and the planetary exploration divisions within those space exploration agencies have even more limited budgets. NASA's budget, for example, is less than half a percent of the US federal budget, and NASA's planetary ...
1
The surface of Mercury is extremely challenging for a thermal designer. A single day/night cycle is 176 Earth days, so except in polar areas permanently shadowed, a lander will experience long periods of extreme heat and cold. In the permanent shadows, it's cold and there's little light for pictures or solar power.
An orbiter has it much easier, as it can ...
15
First of all, landing on one of the gas giants is VERY difficult. They don't really have a surface, so what does landing even mean for such planets? That being said, we actually have sent a camera to both Jupiter and Saturn, although the spacecraft did not survive to tell the tale in both instances.
For Jupiter, we sent first the Galileo Atmospheric Probe to ...
2
That temp ( ~ 1550 K ) looks suspiciously like the maximum Zodiacal dust grain temp before sublimation Thus the dominant thermal blackbody background Voyager is likely to ever see :
" https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Dust-grain-equilibrium-temperatures-vs-distance-from-the-host-star-KIC-3542116-for_fig5_319210038 "
Top 50 recent answers are included
