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Interstellar Missions
When Pioneer 10 eventually passes Aldebaran - projected to be in
around 2 million years time (!), do we know how "close" the flyby is likely to be...not that we'd be around to witness such an event of course. How accurate are the [interstellar] dynamical considerations in projecting these trajectories I wonder? I mean the gravity/mass estimates of stars and their perturbing influences in the vicinity of a spacecraft's trajectory projected across such vast interstellar volumes of space... on journeys over millions of years ... surely adds up to major inaccuracies in the computations? Can someone recommend me a site on the web that has an applet of some kind, a book, or other publication that gives a true 3D perspective of our region of the Milky Way (the 'Orion Arm') say within a cubic volume of space 100 x 100 x 100 light years centred on the Sun (Sol) that then allows visualisation of interstellar flight of an unpowered craft like the Pioneers or the Voyagers? I am looking for an accurate model movable over time, that takes account of proper motions, Milky Way rotation, latest parallax-based distance estimates, stellar mass estimates, etc. When Voaygers 1 and 2 eventually break free of our Sun's sphere of influence and go beyond the NASA heliopause "expectations", which galactic directions are they headed out to, and which star systems could they fly past? What would be interesting is if any of these were projected to go close to a narby sun-like system where exo-planets have already been detected... the food for imaginations and speculations could then prove endless to us all! Abdul Ahad http://uk.geocities.com/aa_spaceagen...eprojects.html |
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Interstellar Missions
In article ,
Abdul Ahad wrote: When Pioneer 10 eventually passes Aldebaran - projected to be in around 2 million years time (!), do we know how "close" the flyby is likely to be...not that we'd be around to witness such an event of course. How accurate are the [interstellar] dynamical considerations in projecting these trajectories I wonder? Last I heard, the biggest uncertainty was simply poor knowledge of the relative velocities of the stars (which are moving much faster than Pioneer itself). I mean the gravity/mass estimates of stars and their perturbing influences in the vicinity of a spacecraft's trajectory projected across such vast interstellar volumes of space... on journeys over millions of years ... surely adds up to major inaccuracies in the computations? Not really, not unless you assume undiscovered dim stars near the path (which is a possibility -- sky-survey missions like Hipparcos have had limited sensitivity). Everything else is just too far away to make a big difference on that time scale. -- MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! | |
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Interstellar Missions
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