Posted on 07/04/2016 9:03:54 AM PDT by BenLurkin
As Juno nears Jupiter tonight, the giant planet's powerful gravity will accelerate the spacecraft to an estimated top speed of about 165,000 mph (265,000 km/h) relative to Earth, mission team members said.
"I don't think we've had any human[-made] object that's moved that fast, that's left the Earth," Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said during a news conference last week.
The all-time speed record is currently held by NASA's Helios 1 and Helios 2 spacecraft, which launched in the mid-1970s to study the sun. Both probes reached top speeds of about 157,000 mph (253,000 km/h) at their points of closest approach to Earth's star.
For perspective: Bullets cut through the air at about 1,700 mph (2,735 km/h), and the International Space Station zooms around Earth at 17,500 mph (28,160 mph).
Indeed, Juno will be moving a bit too fast for its own good tonight. To slow down enough to be captured into Jupiter orbit, the probe must slam on the brakes, which it will do by firing its main engine for 35 minutes, beginning at 11:18 p.m. EDT (0318 GMT) tonight.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
165,000 mph (265,000 km/h) relative to Earth,
The Denver news stations had reporters outside Lockheed Martin this morning, but none mentioned the record speed. They did mention the ‘brakes’ to enter orbit.
which is 0.000246 c
Still can’t even think about going to the Alpha Centauri.
Isn’t the headline a bit misleading?
Juno will reach those speeds for sure, but only because of the gravitational pull of Jupiter, not of its own propulsion.
Still, it’ll be mighty interesting to see what we can learn from this probe.
But can it make the Kessel run in under 12 parses?
And those space cones are fully functional!
*parsecs
Hope this isn’t one of those NASA half-asteroid missions. ;-) Hope everything works okay. I remember, as a small child, getting up early (on the west coast) to watch on an old b&w TV NASA launching the Mercury astronauts, from Alan Shepard to Gordon Cooper.
That's traveling almost as fast as one of the media's lies about Trump!
Nobody can, because parsec is a measure of angular separation, not of time. That has always annoyed me.
Space suits aren’t what they used to be.
Yep, just like a light year is a measure of distance, not time.
I hope that there are no speed traps in the vicinity.
Space suits aren’t what they used to be.
That used to bug me, too, but there is an explanation. In the Star Wars fictional universe, the Kessel run involves going through an area with a cluster of black holes that warp space. Depending on the path through the cluster, the distance differs. Only a really powerful hyperdrive permits one to take the shorter paths without getting sucked into a black hole. Thus, the distance for the Kessel run is shorthand for how powerful your ship’s hyperdrive is.
Not sure if this is cannon though.
Geek more. The boast was more about maneuverability and pilot skill than speed. Once you throw in hyperspace-jumps, it all becomes too silly to be annoying.
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