I’m glad that a bunch of startups made the cut. It makes sense that Maiaspace got in, as an arm of Ariane, but they’re probably less strapped for cash. And thank goodness at least two have reusable concepts, PLD and Maia.
Yeah, it’s a solid bunch. We’re coming up on ten years since the first Falcon 9 booster landing. Multiple chinese companies are developing F9 clones. Europe really ought to be testing reusable boosters by now. Hopefully at least one of these will work out.
So Gaia relies on maintaining very accurate pointing at the stars while measuring their position. For this purpose it uses special cold gas (Nitrogen) thrusters with very low flow noise. These cold gas tanks are now empty and Gaia simply cannot continue to operate.
we don’t want it to reactivate in the future and begin transmitting again if its solar panels find sunlight.
Why go to so much work to ensure it can never be turned on again? What harm does it do to move the satellite to a graveyard orbit and just leave it listening?
Sniff, our most successful scientific Spacecraft by publications. The new Voyage 2050 programme certainly provides science topics that could lead to a worthy successor.
Today’s flyby will be the first to significantly ‘tilt’ the spacecraft’s orbit and allow it to see the Sun’s polar regions, which cannot be seen from Earth.
Huh, it never occurred to me that we haven’t seen what the Sun looks like from above or below the plane of the solar system.
esa.int
Aktywne