Location

Howard Johnson Plaza-Hotel, Atlantis/ Discovery Rooms

Start Date

24-4-1991 2:00 PM

End Date

24-4-1991 5:00 PM

Description

Remarkable planetary observations have been carried out in recent months by a variety of space probes in the frame work of an unprecedented solar system exploration effort. These achievements prove how much good imagery can be collected by means of spacecraft orbiting distant planets at high altitudes. Maps of other planetary characteristics such as their gravitational and magnetic fields and their atmosphere constituent distributions are, however, more difficult to complete. In particular, they cannot be fully obtained by means of remote sensing techniques, but require extensive in-situ data collection. Even more relevant to the subject of this paper, accurate measurements of planetary features are necessarily carried out at very low orbital altitudes, where orbit lifetimes are often severely limited by the high atmospheric densities.

This situation is quite well exemplified by the Earth's upper atmosphere: the transition region where the atmosphere couples to the ionosphere is hard to explore because planetary orbits decay too fast and sounding rockets provide only very limited temporal and spatial coverage. The possibility of dropping sensor packages at such low altitudes (around 100-120 km) and keeping them there for long timespans (weeks/months) looks therefore very attractive to engineers and scientists. This is precisely what carefully designed Tether Systems may one day succeed in doing; indeed, already at their current verification stage they have raised great interest and expectations, due to their potential as scientific experiment support spacecraft.

Comments

Science Payloads

Session Chairman: John M. Klineberg, Director, Goddard Space Flight Center,Greenbelt, MD

Session Organizer: Lee O’Fallon, Space Station Project Office, NASA, Kennedy Space Center, FL

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Apr 24th, 2:00 PM Apr 24th, 5:00 PM

Paper Session II-A - Tethered Satellites: Exotic and Powerful Probes for Scientific Experiments in Low Planetary Orbits

Howard Johnson Plaza-Hotel, Atlantis/ Discovery Rooms

Remarkable planetary observations have been carried out in recent months by a variety of space probes in the frame work of an unprecedented solar system exploration effort. These achievements prove how much good imagery can be collected by means of spacecraft orbiting distant planets at high altitudes. Maps of other planetary characteristics such as their gravitational and magnetic fields and their atmosphere constituent distributions are, however, more difficult to complete. In particular, they cannot be fully obtained by means of remote sensing techniques, but require extensive in-situ data collection. Even more relevant to the subject of this paper, accurate measurements of planetary features are necessarily carried out at very low orbital altitudes, where orbit lifetimes are often severely limited by the high atmospheric densities.

This situation is quite well exemplified by the Earth's upper atmosphere: the transition region where the atmosphere couples to the ionosphere is hard to explore because planetary orbits decay too fast and sounding rockets provide only very limited temporal and spatial coverage. The possibility of dropping sensor packages at such low altitudes (around 100-120 km) and keeping them there for long timespans (weeks/months) looks therefore very attractive to engineers and scientists. This is precisely what carefully designed Tether Systems may one day succeed in doing; indeed, already at their current verification stage they have raised great interest and expectations, due to their potential as scientific experiment support spacecraft.

 

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