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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Mothership for Flybys and cutting costs..
Message-ID: <C6DtD0.HHI@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Sun, 2 May 1993 04:19:47 GMT
References: <1993May1.051312.1@aurora.alaska.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 22

In article <1993May1.051312.1@aurora.alaska.edu> nsmca@aurora.alaska.edu writes:
>... design a mother ship that has piggy backed probes for
>different missions,namely different planets...

Not useful unless you've got some truly wonderful propulsion system for
the mother ship that can't be applied to the probes.  Otherwise it's
better to simply launch the probes independently.  The outer planets
are scattered widely across a two-dimensional solar system, and going
to one is seldom helpful in going to the next one.  Uranus is *not* on
the way to Neptune.  Don't judge interplanetary trajectories in general
by what the Voyagers did:  they exploited a lineup that occurs only
every couple of centuries, and even so Voyager 2 took a rather indirect
route to Neptune.

>Also the mother ship would be powered (if not the Mars Mission) by a normal
>propulsion, but also a solar sail ...

Solar sails are pretty useless in the outer solar system.  They're also
very slow, unless you assume quite advanced versions.
-- 
SVR4 resembles a high-speed collision   | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
between SVR3 and SunOS.    - Dick Dunn  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
