OT - A long way to go for a short distance

geoschmo · #1 August 4th, 2004, 03:28 PM

5 Billion miles sounds about right for all that. It would be more direct to fly straight from here to Mercury, but doing so would take a tremendous amount of fuel as you'd have to decelerate quite a bit to get into orbit. Otherwise it would only have time to snap a few pictures as it zipped by and on out of the solar system, or a firey death as it plunged into the sun.

geoschmo · #2 August 4th, 2004, 03:45 PM

Mercury Mission trajectory WEBSITE

gregebowman · #3 August 4th, 2004, 04:09 PM

Ok, thanks for the info. None of this was mentioned on the news stories that I heard. All I knew was that Mercury was not 5 billion miles from earth. But the slingshot method does sound logical. Hope we get some pretty good pictures in 5-7 years.

narf poit chez BOOM · #4 August 5th, 2004, 02:22 AM

I didn't look at all of the arrows, but the ones I looked at looked like circles, not spirals.