Friday, November 30, 2007

Some pictures of my Europa mission project

Maybe you remember I 'worked' full time for 10 weeks with a group of 9 on a feasibility study of a mission the Europa, a moon of Jupiter, to look for an ocean. I'm not going to bother you with all the details (the report is under the title), but I have some pictures to show you:

A general overview of our designed mission. One spacecraft orbiting Europa and one Jupiter A concept 3D model of the Europa Orbiter The Relay SatelliteMy job: choosing and simulating the orbit of the Europa Orbit in great detail A ground plot of the Europa Orbiter, for a period of a few hours
Plots of altitude versus time of the Europa Orbiter, for different inclinations (90 is a polar orbit)
The predicted time to impact (crash) of the Europa Orbiter for different initial altitudes. The prediction of my model is the orange line, ESA's simulation is the blue line.

3 comments:

cybrbeast said...

Nice graphs. Looks complicated.
There is something wrong with the images though, or it may be my Firefox. But when I click on them it prompts a download screen instead of opening them. Weird.

Kamiel said...

think its because the pics are png and can only be opened with photoshop. Dont know shit about it do :).
Nice pics looks like something i will never understand

pimp-a-lot bear said...

Wow, I felt really important reading the executive summary!
This looks like a decent paper! (it's suprisingly easy to read & understand what you're doing for a spacenoob like me)

But I wonder, what is the lifespan of the Relay satelite? Could it be possible to use it on a second mission to Europa? Would that be feasible?