LADEE Trajectory Update 10-12-13: One hour to last LOI
LADEE’s last Lunar Orbit Insertion burn is scheduled for 8:33 PM PDT today. Woooo Hoooo!
Here’s LADEE now:
From above:
And from Earth:
LADEE Trajectory Update 10-11-13: One LOI left to go
With Lunar Orbit Insertion Burns LOI-1 and LOI-2 done, LADEE now sits in a 4 hr orbit awaiting LOI-3 on Saturday (8:33 PM PDT).
First the view from LADEE:
The view from above the orbit plane:
And the view of LADEE from Earth:
Our favorite LADEE picture yet
Our Japanese friend on twitter @LadeeOrbiter posted this picture today:
This is way cool. It would make a great Halloween costume!
We understand that the twitter account is an unofficial site for lunar impact flash even monitoring by amateur astronomers in Japan to support the LADEE mission. The LADEE effort to involve amateur astronomers all over the world is supported by NASA, and I’d give you the link to their site about this, except that the site (like the rest of the US government) is offline.
So try this link instead.
We also have been told that the LADEE girl in the picture ( the LIMEM@STER) is a parody of a Japanese-made game called THE IDOLM@STER. You can see a bit of that here.
LADEE Trajectory Update 10-9-13: LOI-2 nominal
The LADEE Lunar Orbit Insertion burn 2 (LOI-2) executed as planned this morning at 3:38 PDT, placing LADEE into a 4 hr orbit. Things move much faster now for the spacecraft, and the Moon is looking a lot bigger. We originally captured with a periselene altitude near 560 km but our periselene has now been lowered to an altitude of ~235 km by Earth perturbations in the Post-LOI-1 24 hr orbit. The planned periselene of the commissioning orbit was 250 km, however the small (<1%) underperformance of LOI-1 caused aposelene to be slightly higher, and thus we got slightly more Earth perturbations than we nominally planned for. The result of this is that we got a bit of free lowering from the Earth, which we’ll take! (Since we plan to go lower than 250 km anyway). So the current plan is to drop the aposelene to 250 and perform commissioning there in the 235 x 250 km orbit.
LOI-2 lowered our apogee down to ~2200 (we’ll have to wait for some more tracking to verify that exactly).
From our pre-LOI2 planning, things should now (9 Oct 2013 13:00 UTC) look like this:
And we are here in the orbit:
If you could see the orbit from Earth you’d see this:
LADEE Trajectory Update 10-9-13: 4 hrs to LOI-2
Lunar Orbit Insertion Maneuver 2 (LOI-2) is upon us, scheduled for 09 Oct 2013 10:38 UTC. This maneuver will lower our periselene altitude from 15700 km down to 2220 km and change our orbit period from 24 hrs to 4 hrs.
The maneuver will last for 220.8 seconds, and will impart a delta-V (change in velocity) of 293 m/sec.
Right now LADEE sees this view:
And the orbit from above would look like this:
From Earth, if you could see the orbit, you’d see this:
Go LADEE!