09-February-2009, 10:05 PM
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Order of Kilopi
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 13,365
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Planetary Society Blog: Catching up on some news: [...] Okina impact
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Okina is supposedly going to be crashing into the Moon within two weeks. Okina (also known as RSAT, RStar, or the Relay satellite) is one of two mini-sats deployed by Kaguya as part of its unique lunar gravity experiment. Okina is in a lower orbit than the other (Ouna); the lumpy nature of the lunar gravity field results in fairly fast decay of low orbits. Without any thrust capability to reboost its orbit, Okina's orbit is about to decay into one that intersects the lunar surface, with rather unfortunate results for the spacecraft. (This was planned and expected by the Kaguya mission.)
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