The original thought was a swarm (100-1000) of cubesat MPD thruster craft each
going to a different asteroid then back.
Simple camera plus spectrography, a little magnetics and plasma possibly.
Autonomous mapping and science then return.
No way to get DSN time 8-)
George William Herbert
Sent from my iPhone
On Jan 21, 2016, at 3:12 PM, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jan 2016, Robert Steinke wrote:
The mission could be on a free-return flyby trajectory. No propulsion
needed and you just wait until the probe is at close range to download.
It will be hard to get really huge data volumes from a fast flyby (which is
what you get with such a trajectory). They tend to be associated with more
lingering sorts of mission plans. Again, not unthinkable, but it's a bit of
a stretch.
Perhaps a more plausible scenario is a low-budget mission whose return data
is not compelling enough to pry loose a whole lot of big-dish time on Earth.
You do need *some* comms time regardless, for command and telemetry, and any
downlink that's good enough for debugging a problem can return a lot of data
if you're patient, as witness New Horizons. (Trying to do without a
downlink, or with one that's too slow for troubleshooting, is an invitation
to unexplained failure, which tends to mean you never get funding again.)
But only a high-profile mission can camp on big antennas continuously the way
New Horizons is doing. If what you're doing is kind of boring and
specialized, and your budget is small while your data is large, your access
to antenna time might be inadequate.
Henry
