It's not intended to go entirely without comms. And yes, very near-earth luna
ops debugging first. Cheap to fly by onsies.
Was intended to take a $200m ish hardware budget and get 50% success on
100-1000 largest asteroids. Not to best possible level, but a bunch of up
close high data return science. Refly to priority targets that missions failed
to (or double or triple up for thousand-sized runs...). The small HW would
allow serious testing and HW compression and yet amortize the R&D well.
George William Herbert
Sent from my iPhone
On Jan 21, 2016, at 8:14 PM, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jan 2016, George Herbert wrote:
... You do need *some* comms time regardless, for command and telemetry,The original thought was a swarm (100-1000) of cubesat MPD thruster craft
and any downlink that's good enough for debugging a problem can return a
lot of data if you're patient...
each going to a different asteroid then back. Simple camera plus
spectrography, a little magnetics and plasma possibly. Autonomous mapping
and science then return.
Better debug the design and software in flight tests closer to home, with
live comms, first. Otherwise it will be more than slightly embarrassing when
none of them come back.
(Not kidding even slightly. Perfect autonomous hardware and software is a
pipe dream on cubesat budgets. Actually, even on JPL/BoeDonnell/LockMart
budgets, but that's a bit less obvious.)
No way to get DSN time 8-)
There are alternatives to DSN. They look less capable, but in practice they
may be better choices. :-) But you need something.
Henry
