On Fri, 2 Aug 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 5 km/s hyperbolic excess velocity is none too little. We're lucky if we see
> the things coming before closest approach at all. A day or two, not a week,
> is about what we'd get.
Depends on the asteroid. 2002 NY40, the 800m one that's going to pass at
about 0.5Mkm soon, was discovered on 14 July and makes closest approach
on 18 Aug.
I agree that an extra km/s or so of delta-V makes the system more
versatile, more capable of tackling last-minute missions. But how
important that is depends on the requirements, in particular on whether
the job is to reconnoiter asteroids selected on some other criterion
(e.g., future impact probability) or just to reconnoiter a sampling of
asteroids. In the latter case, you can pick the convenient ones; in
the former, you need as much flexibility as you can get. Even there,
though, some recon capability is better than none.
Henry Spencer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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