They were never considered stranded, except maybe for the few days between Starliner’s empty return and the Crew-9 Dragon’s arrival. Certainly not for 9 months.
Do we know if the Moon will be in the correct phase in it’s orbit when 2024 YR4 comes by? I didn’t notice a term to account for that, but I’m not too familiar with Desmos.
With more launch, the price per rocket should decrease
Should it? Are you referring to amortizing the costs of development, or optimizing the production cost of each rocket? No portion of Ariane 6 is reusable, so it’s not like they can get more launches out of each rocket…
They are not currently stranded, and were never considered stranded, except maybe for the few days between Starliner’s empty return and the Crew-9 Dragon’s arrival.
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.
Technically the solar system is a multi-body system, and everything nudges everything else, but the mass of the earth is far greater than the mass of the asteroid, to the point that it doesn’t matter.