New pictures of Occator coming soon

At long last, we're very close to getting pictures of Occator (the crater with the bright spots on Ceres) from Dawn's current and closest orbit. Mark Rayman's Dawn Journal goes over the mission in February in general, and in a comment below he said the folllowing:

Marc Rayman: 03/01/2016 03:43 CST

ChrisMan and Franklin: I appreciate your interest in Occator, and I understand your eagerness. We have released several images of it from our third mapping orbit at 915 miles. I mentioned in my Feb. 5 mission status report on the Dawn website that we were not even going to acquire our first picture of it in this fourth mapping orbit until late February. As I also explained there, we will release the pictures after following our normal process.

So that along with Super Choose Day today makes the beginning of this month a very memorable one.

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Akatsuki is a few hours away from Venus

Second time's a charm!

http://www.lizard-tail.com/isana/orbview/misc/akatsuki_orbit_insertion.html

We'll know very soon whether it's in orbit. This one's a classic orbital insertion maneuver that either succeeds or fails, so no easing into orbit like Dawn has been able to do.

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Dawn is is orbit around Ceres - watch for the pictures in April

Lots of news yesterday about Dawn officially entering orbit around Ceres, which while a significant calendar date is also no real news to those of us who have been watching image after image as they have been released and are looking for more. Dawn has entered orbit and is currently moving away, then will slowly get dragged back, and only in April will we start to see images at a closer distance than the ones we saw in late February.

A look at the schedule again, with two dates in bold:

Feb 4, 2015 | OpNav #3 | 148,000 km | 68 pixels | 2.2x Hubble resolution
Feb 12, 2015 | Rotation Characterization #1 | 84,000 km | 116 pixels | 3.7x Hubble resolution
Feb 20, 2015 | Rotation Characterization #2 | 48,000 km | 226 pixels | 7x Hubble resolution
Feb 23, 2015 | Closest Approach | | Begin high-phase Approach
Feb 25, 2015 | OpNav #4 | 39,000 km | 264 pixels | 8x Hubble resolution
Mar 2, 2015 | OpNav #5 | 50,000 km | 205 pixels | 6.5x Hubble resolution
Mar 6, 2015 | Capture| | Capture into orbit
Apr 10, 2015 | OpNav #6 | 33,000 km | 300 pixels | 9.5x Hubble resolution
Apr 15, 2015 | OpNav #7 | 21,000 km | 470 pixels | 15x Hubble resolution

Why those ones in particular? Because 9.5x Hubble resolution and 15x Hubble resolution coincide perfectly with two upcoming very large telescopes:

The Giant Magellan Telescope will have a resolving power 10 times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope, and

the European Extremely Large Telescope, with a resolving power 16 times greater.

If you've been watching the images up until now you'll know that the bright spot on Ceres has turned out to be (at least) two, with an albedo of nearly 0.5 (Ceres is 0.09), but still not detailed enough to tell exactly what they are. They could be a result of cryovolcanism without being actual cryovolcanoes. But suffice to say that we can't tell exactly what they are at this point.

So the question is whether we will be able to with the images on 10 April and 15 April. If they turn out to be detailed enough that we can satisfactorily make some conclusions about them then 10x or 16x Hubble resolution may turn out to be enough for us to make similar conclusions about other major bodies between Mars and Jupiter, and if not...then in the early 2020s we are going to be hit with image after image of tantalizing but inconclusive features on these minor planets we want to know so much about. Given how vague these two spots still are, I'm not positive the early April pictures will tell us what we need to know.

After that there is one more distance that will be interesting: 10,000 km, the distance at which Dawn reaches the resolving power of the cancelled Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. It's no wonder that telescope was promoted as one that would provide "a planetary flyby every night".

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Beautiful Ceres

We're getting images twice this resolution this week (mid-week so maybe in two days), but in the meantime the clever people at Unmanned Spaceflight have stitched together what we have, and then colourized them with the Hubble Space Telescope image, the image that until Dawn approached was our highest resolution of the planet.

It's also a rotating image. Here it is:

http://imgur.com/4B1TfHg

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In Korea for a bit, better-than-Hubble Ceres resolution very soon

Apologies for not writing for quite some time but I'm in Seoul at the moment where I've been for a week. Sometimes in life you just have to rush off and cross the Pacific to watch a musical. Any guesses which one it is?

In the meantime Dawn has obtained the better-than-Hubble images of Ceres and will be releasing them probably tomorrow. As for what's coming up next we have the following:

Feb 4, 2015 | OpNav #3 | 148,000 km | 68 pixels | 2.2x Hubble resolution
Feb 12, 2015 | Rotation Characterization #1 | 84,000 km | 116 pixels | 3.7x Hubble resolution
Feb 20, 2015 | Rotation Characterization #2 | 48,000 km | 226 pixels | 7x Hubble resolution
Feb 23, 2015 | Closest Approach | | Begin high-phase Approach
Feb 25, 2015 | OpNav #4 | 39,000 km | 264 pixels | 8x Hubble resolution
Mar 2, 2015 | OpNav #5 | 50,000 km | 205 pixels | 6.5x Hubble resolution
Mar 6, 2015 | Capture| | Capture into orbit
Apr 10, 2015 | OpNav #6 | 33,000 km | 300 pixels | 9.5x Hubble resolution
Apr 15, 2015 | OpNav #7 | 21,000 km | 470 pixels | 15x Hubble resolution
Apr 23, 2015 | Rotation Characterization #3 | 13,000 km | 20x Hubble resolution

The reason for returning to 6.5x Hubble resolution is the odd but brilliant maneuver Dawn is undergoing to reach orbit at the same time as planned before in spite of losing a reaction wheel. It involves flying a bit past Ceres, then letting itself get captured, then swinging back in a long elliptical orbit that it will then change into a more proper one for surveying and mapping.

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25-pixel Ceres photos to be released on January 20th

The picture for navigation that Dawn took on the 13th (or around the 13th) is going to be released very soon. I'm exceptionally glad to see that the time this time around has announced the release date ahead of time instead of just making us wait as was the case with the Vesta approach.

Dawn is also a little more hobbled this time around (but still okay) so navigation photos are taking place every two weeks or so instead of weekly.

Dawn is taking an image of #Ceres this week, it'll be posted on the 20th, @oker59, #notyetbetterthanhubble

— NASA's Dawn Mission (@NASA_Dawn) 14 Janvier 2015

In the meantime we also have some news on Ceres from ground-based observations, a study suggesting that there is a lot of short-term variability of water ice on the surface. It was released a month ago, about the last time such a study would be useful since we are now right on the verge of being able to confirm or deny this.

Dawn is now closer to Ceres than our moon is to us.

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Ceres speculation begins

I'm happy to see that speculation about Ceres (underground oceans, jets of water, life, potential colonization) has already begun. Articles like this one have begun to appear, and this when Dawn's best picture of Ceres is just 9 pixels across. If it were to take a picture of Ceres today it would be 16 pixels or so, but the next image won't be taken until January 13 at a resolution of 25 pixels. That still won't be as good as Hubble but it will be a treat. Also the first image taken for navigation purposes, as the last one was to calibrate its science camera.

After that January 26 will come around when we see the first better-than-Hubble image of Ceres. Dawn will then approach Ceres, pass by it a bit, get captured in March, and turn back. Not sure what pictures we'll have around this time, but once we have anything better than Hubble the mission will be a success.

In any case, massive speculation about Ceres should begin in just 18 or so days. In the meantime New Horizons won't be at better than Hubble resolution for Pluto until May, so January to May will be Dawn's time to own the limelight.

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9-pixel image of Ceres now released

Very pleased with the speed in which they released this picture.'

And the 9 pixels-long Ceres looks like...





This!

And this is just the beginning. Dawn is now about 1 million km away from the tiny ice planet.

As for what Ceres looks like at that distance compared to the rest of the sky:

The nine-pixel-wide image of Ceres released today serves as a final calibration of the science camera that is necessary before Dawn gets to Ceres. The dwarf planet appears approximately as bright as Venus sometimes appears from Earth. Ceres has an average diameter of about 590 miles (950 kilometers).

So Ceres at 1.2 million km is marginally brighter than Venes at 50 million km or so. Venus is much larger, but Ceres also has a really, really low albedo (9%). Still higher than Comet 67p (5%), mind you. The moon is at 12% for comparison.

To illustrate this take a look at this picture that was passed around online quite a bit a few weeks back, to show the difference between a nearly 100% albedo (Enceladus) and 5% (Comet 67p). Venus is 90%, Earth is 30%. So Ceres is slightly closer to albedo of our moon.

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9-pixel Ceres picture being taken as we speak

Great news - we're getting our first eye candy of Ceres soon. The picture is actually just being taken for science camera calibration purposes, but we'll see it soon (if they know what's good for them) and it will be our first real picture of Ceres that Dawn has taken. There actually was another photo of Ceres taken before but that was taken even before it reached Vesta, so nothing any more spectacular than the Ceres we can see in the sky as well, other than the fact that there is no atmosphere getting in the way.

But this one will be nine pixels across.

One final calibration of the science camera is needed before arrival at Ceres. To accomplish it, the camera needs to take pictures of a target that appears just a few pixels across. The endless sky that surrounds our interplanetary traveler is full of stars, but those beautiful pinpoints of light, while easily detectable, are too small for this specialized measurement. But there is an object that just happens to be the right size. On Dec. 1, Ceres will be about nine pixels in diameter, nearly perfect for this calibration.

So it'll be something like this blown up.

Can't wait!

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Comet 67p to scale

I love these images. And users like these are why Reddit is still a site worth going to (just unsubscribe from bad subreddits, subscribe to the good ones) in spite of some of its overall silliness.

The image is a close-up of comet 67p, with the Freedom Tower, the Eiffel Tower, an airplane (doesn't say what kind, probably a Boeing 777 or Airbus 320 kind of size), a car, and a banana. Oh, and a neighborhood block.

The reason for the thread in the first place are the presence of sand dunes (look under the Eiffel Tower), which is a very cool thing to see on a comet.

And by the way, Dawn is now just 2.8 million km from Ceres. Both dreading and looking forward to winter at the same time is a very odd feeling.

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Nicaragua was hit with by a meteorite today

Wonderful news - Earth was hit by a meteorite today. It's good news because nobody was injured and no damage was caused, but it was close to an urban centre and really drives home the point that we are not immune to events like this. The only way it could have been better would have been if we had a few days' warning about it.

Coincidentally (or not?!), today is also the close approach of asteroid 2014 RC.

Note: there aren't too many articles on this just yet so maybe I am a bit skeptical, considering the one meteorite hoax in Latvia a few years ago. We should find out about its veracity fairly soon.

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Free flyby: 2014 RC passing by us at 40,000 km in 3 days

Great news: we get a free flyby of an asteroid at a very close distance in just three days. Flybys of asteroids closer than the distance to the moon are very rare, and this one will be nearly ten times closer. Too small to be seen with the unaided eye, we'll still see some videos of it and, naturally, Goldstone has quickly made it a priority.

2014 RC is an object roughly 15 meters in diameter that will make an extremely close approach to Earth at 0.1 Earth-Moon distances on 2014 September 7. Nothing is known about the asteroid other than a crude estimate of its diameter, but the close approach distance indicates that this object will be a very strong radar target on Sep. 7. This will be one of the closest approaches known an object of this size or larger. The encounter provides an excellent opportunity to study the physical properties of this object, which is in a size class that is not well understood.

It's just a pity that it's not going to hit us, because it would do hardly any damage but would have made headlines for a full week as it approached.

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Speaking of old German things

I came across another old German book here, upon doing a search for the keyword Ceres during the 50 or so years it was considered to be a planet. This was back before the term asteroid had been clearly defined, when the only objects we were capable of discovering were around planetary size. Eventually so many of them were discovered that a decision was made to call them something else besides a planet, the term asteroid was coined, and Ceres vanished from view. Who wants to explore an asteroid, after all, when there are planets to be explored? Were Ceres to have remained a planet, it likely would have been visited a lot sooner than early 2015.

As a book from 1805 the German orthography is old and the first parts of the book are full of calculations along with bad scans that make it hard to read. Around page 300 though it gets into direct observations of the planet, and by then the scanning quality is better. So if you're into that sort of thing, read a bit of the intro, then skip over the badly scanned parts and then make your way toward the end.

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Armenian Wikipedia, Rosetta, Mormon language learning, Gaza tunnel diggers

I haven't been writing here much recently, simply because I've been so occupied with reading. Maybe two months ago I came across this study showing the effects of massive amounts of reading (1+ million words) and how it compared to time spent abroad, and apparently the general rule is 1 million words equalled about the same improvement as a year overseas. This one here is interesting too, especially the chart a few pages down. That chart shows that the volume of text needed to be exposed to 10,000 words at least once is 600,000+ words. To see them three times each: 3+ million.

So I thought I would read The Wheel of Time (4+ million words) in two languages and see what a difference it makes. And also to truly get a feel for what a million words is like. A million is a lot of words. I'm currently halfway through book 5. I read up to book 8 in English before back in the 1990s, and decided that I would stop reading until the series was completed, which it was two years ago.

I don't like to treat Page F30 as a polyglot blog, given the limitations it places on what one can write about, but this spreadsheet might be interesting to readers.

Words means the number of words I've deleted that day (I use Readlang.com for this), words learning is the number of words registered there, and it goes up as new words are added and others I don't need to review anymore are deleted. Total is the total number of new words I assume have been put in my head since starting this, 1400 is just a number to make the graph look nice, pages is the number of pages read that day, words read is pages multiplied by 350. Then divide that by new words, which gives words per new word. That last column has turned out to be less meaningful than I thought because it depends on my mood whether I click on a word or not. Sometimes I feel like adding a word I kind of know but want to see a few more times anyway, and other times I don't.

On days off I can read 20,000+ words, on work days I can get 10,000 words in, sometimes fewer.

Date	Words	Running total	Words learning	Total		Pages	Words read	New words	Words per new word
July 7	22	201	720	921	1400	61	21350	45	474,44
July 8	25	226	751	977	1400	56	19600	56	350,00
July 9	25	251	792	1043	1400	68	23800	66	360,61
July 10	45	296	772	1068	1400	56	19600	25	784,00
July 11	137	433	652	1085	1400	30	10500	17	617,65
July 12	33	466	664	1130	1400	63	22050	45	490,00
July 13	16	482	670	1152	1400	31	10850	22	493,18
July 14	8	490	693	1183	1400	45	15750	31	508,06
July 15	2	492	715	1207	1400	39, on page 685	13650	24	568,75
July 16	13	505	734	1239	1400	102, on page 39	35700	32	1 115,63
July 17	2	507	737	1244	1400	29, on page 68	10150	5	2 030,00
July 18	110	617	637	1254	1400	21, on page 89	7350	10	735,00
July 19	120	737	535	1272	1400	64, on page 153	22400	18	1 244,44
July 20	55	792	490	1282	1400	41, on page 194	14350	10	1 435,00
July 21	41	833	456	1289	1400	19, on page 213	5795	7	827,86
July 22	39	872	431	1303	1400	17, on page 230	5950	14	425,00
July 23	18	890	418	1308	1400	13, on page 243	4550	5	910,00
July 24	36	926	423	1349	1400	34, on page 277	11900	41	290,24
July 25	35	961	415	1376	1400	29, on page 306	10150	27	375,93
July 26	18	979	450	1429	1400	54, on page 360	18900	53	356,60
July 27	24	1003	449	1452	1400	40, on page 400	14000	23	608,70
July 28	24	1027	448	1475	1400	40, on page 440	14000	23	608,70
July 29	8	1035	449	1484	1400	25, on page 465	8750	9	972,22
July 30	36	1071	453	1524	1400	47, on page 512	16450	40	411,25
July 31	52	1123	453	1576	1400	82, on page 594	28700	52	551,92

So let's let to the other items in the title.

Armenian Wikipedia: I remember being disappointed at its tiny size a year or two ago, and apparently it has exploded since then due to a national campaign to have everyone write one article each. Here's one video encouraging Armenians to contribute:





Rosetta: the mission, not the language learning software. I an extremely pleased with them releasing daily images of the comet as Rosetta approaches. Dawn had better do something similar when it approaches Ceres in the next few months, as the lack of images during the Vesta approach was simply unacceptable.

• CometWatch 30 July
• CometWatch 29 July
• CometWatch 28 July
• CometWatch 25-27 July
• CometWatch - 24 July

Mormons: NPR has an article on the techniques they use to learn languages. I've always been impressed by the way they learn languages, since the first time I ever spoke with a non-Japanese person only in Japanese with a Mormon from Brazil in Nagoya.

Gaza tunnel diggers: This documentary with French subtitles is one of the more interesting documentaries I've seen in a while. It is a few years old, and is just 50 minutes of following a few of these tunnel diggers around as they do their thing. It has music but no extra commentary, which is great. A documentary without the typical dozens and dozens of quips from specialists speaking on the matter in their office is a rare treat.

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Gemini Planet Imager

Keep an eye out for this term over the next few years. The Gemini Planet Imager is an adaptive optics instrument that saw first light recently and imaged an exoplanet the other day, and the results look phenomenal. The image in that article is a large exoplanet around 60 light years away, and the planet in the image looks to be maybe...15 pixels or so wide. I've surmised in other posts before that inhabitable exoplanet discoveries will probably not enter our general consciousness until we have an image of at least reasonable quality. Something large enough to give a person chills in looking at it.

On the site we can also see an image produced of Europa, compared to the close-up images we have from Galileo and the Voyagers before it. I kind of feel like bugging them to take a look at 24 Themis.

GPI can look at worlds in our solar system, like Jupiter's moon Europa (right) and a probe-based picture on the left. pic.twitter.com/GhJR1wX0Dd
— Gemini Planet Imager (@PlanetImager) 7 Janvier 2014

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Russia's $52 billion boost to Roscosmos, Venus Express to enter Venusian atmosphere

Russia lost another Proton rocket a few days ago, bad news for them, but they are also planning to boost the budget of Roscosmos by $52 billion (USD) by 2020.

The current budget is $5.6 billion per year, so an extra $52 billion by 2020 would be more than doubling it, an extra $8.7 billion a year. That makes me wonder whether the "has boosted the budget of its Federal Space Agency by 1.8 trillion rubles ($52 billion)" is actually a bad translation and the agency is actually planning to spend a total of $52 billion by that year, which would also be an increase.

Which means it's time to look through Russian articles on the announcement, and try to read them using both the Bulgarian I know and Google Translate. Here's one:

Общий объем бюджетного финансового обеспечения госпрограммы - 1,8 трлн. рублей. -- Total amount of budgetary financial support to the state program - 1.8 trillion rubles

Россия выделит из федерального бюджета 1,8 млн рублей на государственную программу «Космическая деятельность России на 2013-2020 годы», следует из документа, размещенного во вторник на сайте Роскосмоса. -- Russia will allocate 1.8 trillion rubles from the federal budget to the state program "Russian Space Activities from 2013 to 2020".

In any case, it's an increase. It's apparently being done mostly for modernization (kind of boring but very necessary) and lunar activities (not boring). Let's hope Russia also returns to its previous USSR backyard, Venus.



And on that note, Venus Express is running low on fuel and is going to start aerobraking at as low an altitude as possible: "We have performed previous short ‘aerodrag’ campaigns where we’ve skimmed the thin upper layers of the atmosphere at about 165 km, but we want to go deeper, perhaps as deep as 130 km, maybe even lower”. The aerobraking will take place from June 18 to July 11, and if there is enough fuel left they will take it back up into a higher orbit. Or it may simply not have enough fuel and that will be the end of the mission.

And then in a year, Akatsuki will try to enter orbit around Venus again.

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SpaceX, LADEE done, Israel to the moon, Vesta and Ceres together, almost the perfect exoplanet

Lots of things to mention today that have happened or been announced in the past few days.

Starting with SpaceX today which has done two noteworthy things today: first we have their first launch F9R which is the successor to Grasshopper, and one step closer to a reusable rocket. This first flight went off without a hitch, which is what we are coming to expect from them.



The second is their third flight to the ISS, which is another success. This flight was delayed a few times.

LADEE is done: it impacted the moon today. This was on purpose:

LADEE lacked fuel to maintain a long-term lunar orbit or continue science operations and was intentionally sent into the lunar surface. The spacecraft's orbit naturally decayed following the mission's final low-altitude science phase.

Israel to the moon: you may remember the name Sheldon Adelson, who donated a huge amount of money to the unsuccessful Romney campaign back in 2012. He is now going to donate $16 million to a much easier program, SpaceIL, which is one of the competitors for the Google Lunar X Prize. The beauty about this competition is that it has attracted competitors from nations that otherwise wouldn't be aiming at such a lofty target. Since SpaceIL has a budget of $36 million and the prize itself is $20 million, I assume this $16 million donation is a symbolic covering of the program cost on the assumption they will get the prize (20 + 16 = 36).

Vesta and Ceres are converging in the sky as viewed from Earth. If we look at Dawn's current position we can see why that is the case:

Current distance from Dawn to Ceres is now just 16.65 million km, which is three times closer than Venus ever gets to us, and 43 times the distance from us to the moon. Ceres is still just a bright star at this distance, of course.

Last but not least, we have the discovery of an exoplanet that is: 1) just about the same size as Earth, 2) within the habitable zone of its star. However, it is 3) 500 light years away. Were that number to be around 30 or so (and hopefully well under) it would be the perfect exoplanet discovery. At a distance of say 10 light years that gives us the possibility of sending a signal and having a possible response one decade later, but at 500 light years we would have to wait ten centuries. So it's not quite the discovery that we need to capture the attention of humanity as a whole.

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What Chris Hadfield learned from going blind in space

Nothing really to add to this except an exhortation to watch it. So few people have the experience of ever going to space, and so few of those can describe it in the way Hadfield does.

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More pretending Venus doesn't exist

Hilarious. Have a quick look at this article, and see how far one has to read into it to discover that it's really about a mission to fly by two planets and not just one. Let's take a look at all the instances of the word Mars compared to Venus.

...potential Mars flyby...
...a Mars flyby mission in 2021...
...Mars Flyby Alternative...
..."Moon, Mars and Beyond"...
...land a crew on Mars...
...Mars, as the ultimate goal...
...a mission to Mars...
...alignment for Mars missions...
...unique alignment between Earth and Mars in 2021 that would include a flyby of the planet Venus...
...a trip to Mars...
...the crew would fly past Venus...
...a trip towards Mars...
...Mars would be big in the window...
...Mars flyby mission...
...initial trip to Mars...
...for a Mars 2021 flyby...
...the notion of a Mars flyby...
...(Mars missions)...
...send humans to Mars...
...flight out to Mars...
...Such is the risk, another Mars flyby proposal, via the Inspiration Mars effort...
...Inspiration Mars also have...
...The potential crossover of both NASA’s and Mars Inspiration’s missions...
...classing the Mars flyby proposal as “foolhardy”...
...support for a Mars flyby...
...the numerous Mars mission studies...
...it lacks a detailed Mars approach...
...providing evaluations into Mars missions...
...landing on one of the moons of Mars...
...ahead of landing on Mars itself...
...Mars flyby in 2021...


Ctrl-f shows 36 instances of the word Mars on the page, 2 for Venus. I've never seen a potential mission downplay itself in this way. When one is selling a two-planet flyby to Congress, why give the impression that there is only one? Also notice the lack of window time for the Venus flyby:

Mars would be big in the window for around 40 hours, as they whiz past the planet, ahead of a free trajectory return to Earth.

In terms of window time, the puny Mars will be much shorter. Putting the two side by side shows the stark difference between the two.

Also, as the first destination of the mission we have the following possibilities:

Total mission failure
Success on Venus flyby, followed by mission failure
Success on Venus flyby and Mars flyby, followed by mission failure
Success on Venus flyby, Mars flyby, return to Earth

There is no scenario where a Mars flyby does happen and the Venus one doesn't.

Don't get me wrong, I love Mars as much as any other planet of its type. But to pretend that a planet over 7 times more massive than Mars isn't even part of the picture makes no sense at all.

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Inspiration Mars is more exciting when Venus is added

As a vehement opponent of Mars-first manned exploration, Inspiration Mars has never been high on my list of things to write about. Neither are Dennis Tito's justifications for the mission very convincing -- namely, that the US needs to send people on a flyby to Mars RIGHT NOW or risk being outdone by other nations that will step forward and grab the prize the US is reluctant to take. Whether he truly believes this or whether it's simply a selling point to Congress when he asks NASA to share the funding, I'm not sure.

On the other hand, Tito does have billions of dollars and has used them to go to space before. Also, the mission he proposes is certainly possible, as it doesn't involve a landing on the planet. The complete inability to land people on Mars at the moment is one of the main reasons why I oppose wasting our efforts on exploring there before anywhere else. Take a landing out of the picture, and suddenly the mission is a lot easier, involving a launch, cruise past a planet, and a landing on Earth.

In spite of that, a 2017 launch is simply too soon, and this unrealistic target is another reason why I have never mentioned the mission here. That is why the idea of a Plan B which began to be floated last year is so enticing. Such a mission would take an extra 80 days, and uses a unique trajectory available in 2021 that would let the two crewmembers first fly past Venus on the way to Mars. Venus, as (annoyingly) not many people know, is actually much closer to us than Mars is. Indeed, this is why Venus is used by nearly all missions requiring a gravitational slingshot. It's simply too convenient to overlook

Adding Venus plus an extra 4 years of preparation time changes the mission from something unrealistic and bland into one that is much more appealing. Instead of a simple trip to Mars and back, we have an encounter with our much larger sister planet on the way:

and the crewmembers will experience the Solar System first from in front and then behind us, first inward to see the sun at almost twice its strength, the thick cloud layer surrounding our sister planet and the hellish conditions below (though up in the clouds it is relatively nice as far as Solar System environments are concerned), followed by a trip to the neighborhood of Mars where the sun is about a third the strength of the one we see, then a flyby over the planet and then a trip back.

The two destinations on both sides of our planet would add an extra dimension to the mission that a single mission would lack, and we could hear first-hand the experience viewing one compared to the other. Which planet is more viscerally appealing? Is Venus actually as scary as the numbers would lead one to believe, or is there a certain dystopian appeal to it? Does Mars actually feel like the planet where we should have boots on the ground, or is it a disappointment when seen up close? Being able to compare one with another makes this an exponentially more interesting mission, along with the more realistic timeline.

All this puts me firmly in the Plan B camp. At the moment the foundation is still strongly advocating for Plan A (the website still only has one reference to the Plan B), and the only reference to it is coupled with the unrealistic assertion that China is interested in doing the same thing.

A Plan B, if we need one, is a mission longer by 88 days that flies by Venus before going by Mars, a unique trajectory that could be flown in 2021. The downside is that by then, another country – almost surely China – will have seen our missed opportunity, and taken the lead for themselves.

Advocating Plan B on its own will be necessary, IMO, for this mission to be a success.

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