Slow And Steady Wins The Space Race
Nov. 16th, 2004 07:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
filkertomThe SMART-1 spacecraft has successfully achieved lunar orbit.
Why is this so kewl? A number of reasons. They're planning to do a lot of state-of-the-art 3D imaging and chemical analysis of the lunar surface. It's a European Space Agency project, rather than NASA. And... their ion-propulsion system, which took a series of expanding circles around the earth, used up only 130 pounds of xenon fuel. About five million miles to the gallon.
They still had 51 pounds left.
Now that's the stuff of long-range exploration vessels.
Yahoo news story with lots of links here.
Why is this so kewl? A number of reasons. They're planning to do a lot of state-of-the-art 3D imaging and chemical analysis of the lunar surface. It's a European Space Agency project, rather than NASA. And... their ion-propulsion system, which took a series of expanding circles around the earth, used up only 130 pounds of xenon fuel. About five million miles to the gallon.
They still had 51 pounds left.
Now that's the stuff of long-range exploration vessels.
Yahoo news story with lots of links here.
