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Originally Posted by Elias
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I can easily explain why the thrusters had to respond more - the moon is much heavier than expected. What other kind of a gorilla could it be, this time?
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And how easily you can explain why the heavier moon only affects the thrusters, the atmosphere and not the Cassini trajectory? Is your theory selective? How can you explain that in all Titan flybys Cassini went where it was supposed to go?
From this article:
"Until we can sort out all of those issues, we?re going to have to raise the [950 km] altitudes to 1,025 kilometers."
See? They decided to make a trajectory change and they succeeded. Cassini flew by from Titan at the correct altitude. And by the way where would you expect to see a gravity effect primarily? In the orientation of a spacecraft or in its orbit? Obviously on its trajectory. But you don't see it... |
Cassini is in orbit about Saturn, not Titan. If you look at the ratio of the mass of Saturn to the mass of Titan, the effect of Titan on Cassini's orbit is trivial unless the the probe passes very close to Titan. Then the numbers rise dramatically:
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Originally Posted by planetary Society
At the same time, we also took the information from the thrusters about how hard the spacecraft had to work fight the atmosphere. The answer was, ‘harder than we thought.’ At 1,200 kilometers they were fighting at 6% capacity."
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So they have a bug counter counting bugs on the windscreen, they even know what kind of bugs, but the vehicle is still slowing down at three times the known bug rate. Bad gas?
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Six percent may not sound like much, but when that number was extrapolated to a lower altitude, the navigators found a problem. "At 950 kilometers they’d be fighting at over 106% capacity.
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What were the thrusters fighting if not gravity? More Dark energy?
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Originally Posted by Elias
The orientation of Cassini does not primarily depend on gravity and thats all you need to know for what you ask. There are no issues at all with gravity in what you posted.
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Wrong! Everybody and their dog assumes there is no gravity issue, even though the strong equivalence principle has only been tested outside of the Earth - Moon orbit twice, and it failed both tests.
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Originally Posted by Elias
If gravity was the solution of this "puzzle", then Huygens would have seen it in its trajectory data, the same for Cassini and all other spacecraft.
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Once again, 99% of the trajectory of Huygens was based upon the path of Huygens relative to Saturn, not Titan. Huygens was not monitored during the closing moments of the descent, at distances in which
we now know Cassini experienced an unexpected and as yet unexplained tugging towards Titan. This discrepancy has not been deemed serious enough to dedicate more than one line to in the significant event log, but serious enough to reroute the rest of the mission. This is nuts.
Wanna see a really good demonstration of new physics? Sometime, near the end of Cassini's mission, we should put it on a spiraling free-orbit into one of Saturn's moons, preferably the largest moon without a complicating atmosphere, then watch what happens. We would FINALLY have an extra-Earth orbit demonstration of unexpected gravity forces that could not be written of as bugs on the windscreen, high drag, low drag, updrafts, down drafts, solar wind, gas leaks, late parachute deployment, paint chips...