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In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Daniel Burstein) writes: |
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>A short story in the newspaper a few days ago made some sort of mention |
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>about how the Japanese, using what sounded like a gravity assist, had just |
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>managed to crash (or crash-land) a package on the moon. |
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Their Hiten engineering-test mission spent a while in a highly eccentric |
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Earth orbit doing lunar flybys, and then was inserted into lunar orbit |
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using some very tricky gravity-assist-like maneuvering. This meant that |
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it would crash on the Moon eventually, since there is no such thing as |
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a stable lunar orbit (as far as anyone knows), and I believe I recall |
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hearing recently that it was about to happen. |
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All work is one man's work. | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology |
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- Kipling | [email protected] utzoo!henry |
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