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Wednesday, January 4, 2012
How Are We Getting to Mars Without Some Stress?
It is nearly six months on the job, and Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) Superintendent Joshua Starr is still running his mouth. The dude loves to talk. Here he is on November 22nd talking to the county PTA organization...
Ah, well, "coasting" to Mars, a bit of a technicality there. Yes, requires a lot of energy to get a spacecraft out of Earth's atmosphere, adjust its orbit, etc., but once the spacecraft is on its merry way to Mars, it burns no more fuel until it gets there. As of now, it's monstrously expensive to carry fuel to space, so space vehicles do a neat trick by orbiting around Earth in such a way that they rob us of a little bit of our angular momentum, shooting the vehicle off towards where Mars is (rather, will be), and don't worry about going a wee bit faster by burning costly fuel the whole way. So in essence, space vehicles do "coast" their ways to Mars.
Now, going with the analogy of Jerry Weast getting the kids to the Moon, it ain't exactly a piece of cake to go from the Moon to Mars. In fact, if you're starting from an orbit around the Moon, you're probably not at all where you want to be to get to Mars. You'll have to burn all kinds of fuel to change your Moon orbit, get into the appropriate orbit around Earth (a lot of work), then burn a bunch more fuel to kick out of orbit and head to Mars (a lot a lot of work), and that doesn't even take into consideration the fuel you'll have to burn once you get to Mars to either keep you from shooting off into empty space or smashing into the big ol' rock (yup, you guessed it, more work). And no, if you over shoot, you're almost definitely not headed for bigger and better Jupiter. You're in DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON! Or shooting for the Starrs (ok, ok, last one. But seriously, don't think that's a good thing, the nearest ones are 4.5 lightyears away, and there's nothing there anyway).
Oh, did I mention, you have to plan all this out before you leave Earth? So Weast had better supplied you with enough fuel to move from the Moon to Mars. Which is highly unlikely, because even with our 2 Billion dollar budget, we don't have financial room to play around with superfluous orbit changes. In fact, it'll take multiple years of that budget to really put together a mission to Mars, and that's assuming it's spent solely on the vehicle, fuel, and staff, instead of advertising how awesome we are for going to Mars.
Ah, well, "coasting" to Mars, a bit of a technicality there. Yes, requires a lot of energy to get a spacecraft out of Earth's atmosphere, adjust its orbit, etc., but once the spacecraft is on its merry way to Mars, it burns no more fuel until it gets there. As of now, it's monstrously expensive to carry fuel to space, so space vehicles do a neat trick by orbiting around Earth in such a way that they rob us of a little bit of our angular momentum, shooting the vehicle off towards where Mars is (rather, will be), and don't worry about going a wee bit faster by burning costly fuel the whole way. So in essence, space vehicles do "coast" their ways to Mars.
ReplyDeleteNow, going with the analogy of Jerry Weast getting the kids to the Moon, it ain't exactly a piece of cake to go from the Moon to Mars. In fact, if you're starting from an orbit around the Moon, you're probably not at all where you want to be to get to Mars. You'll have to burn all kinds of fuel to change your Moon orbit, get into the appropriate orbit around Earth (a lot of work), then burn a bunch more fuel to kick out of orbit and head to Mars (a lot a lot of work), and that doesn't even take into consideration the fuel you'll have to burn once you get to Mars to either keep you from shooting off into empty space or smashing into the big ol' rock (yup, you guessed it, more work). And no, if you over shoot, you're almost definitely not headed for bigger and better Jupiter. You're in DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON! Or shooting for the Starrs (ok, ok, last one. But seriously, don't think that's a good thing, the nearest ones are 4.5 lightyears away, and there's nothing there anyway).
Oh, did I mention, you have to plan all this out before you leave Earth? So Weast had better supplied you with enough fuel to move from the Moon to Mars. Which is highly unlikely, because even with our 2 Billion dollar budget, we don't have financial room to play around with superfluous orbit changes. In fact, it'll take multiple years of that budget to really put together a mission to Mars, and that's assuming it's spent solely on the vehicle, fuel, and staff, instead of advertising how awesome we are for going to Mars.
I agree that Jerry Weat got us to the moon: an arrid, airless wasteland.
ReplyDelete