http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/09...calls-dawn.html In a playful article, the JPL team tells the tale of the small spacecraft that could. Dawn is the first spacecraft to visit one celestial body (the large asteroid Vesta) explore it and then move on to a completely different celestial body (the dwarf planet Ceres) and explore that (both live in the asteroid belt). Due to launch September 26th (that's next Wednesday), this ion powered craft needs only a small amount of fuel for its seven year zoom around rock alley. Why can't we use engines with that sort of efficiency on all our missions? Not enough horsepower. Imagine a piece of notebook paper. "The weight of that paper pushing against your hand is the same as the thrust provided by one of Dawn's ion engines -- at full throttle I might add," says propulsion systems manager John Brophy. Not even enough to push a skateboard down a sidewalk, he adds later. It's a cool technology demonstrator, it may even be the system that I base my eventual FedEd to Mars company around. (I mean how much would you pay for a pound bag of M&Ms after you've been on Mars for a year?) The engines themselves are the size of basketballs, the fuel is the gas Xenon, but the coolest part is the "blue beam of rocket exhaust that shoots out at 89,000 miles per hour." I also think that I just like that they call it the Prius of Space. Shows what sorts of Solar System Environmentalists we have out at JPL and lord knows we need them! Remember when they called the natural resources of the New World "limitless." Any mission to a new place is cool too, and learning more about the origin of the solar system sounds like a good idea. But I have to admit my bias that I think visiting the asteroid "Hidalgo" would be cooler. Maybe next trip. (I will even forgive the writer for the succumbing to the use of a pun in the last line of the article. "Those space aficionados who want to keep their "ion" the mission...")
You always have to take the press releases from NASA with a grain of salt ... remember the Shuttle was supposed to drive down the cost of launches because it was "reusable" (and it cost more than using "big dumb booster" rockets). But unmanned efforts like this make much more sense, scientifically, than wasting our money tossing teachers around in orbit. In one of these unmanned missions, at 1/100th of the cost, we get much more knowledge than we do from goofy astronauts sucking up water globules. There is a place for manned missions; fixing the Hubble was one I agree with, but for the most part, science is better served by robots than astronauts.
Did you mean to say space is better served by robots? Science needs all the stellar minds it can get.
Interestingly enough, one of my fraternity brothers was actually working on this project (or one very similar to it) in designing the propulsion system.
