Recent content by Peter3210

Thanks everyone. Just to clarify the reason I asked about Earth's SOI, here's the problem I encountered: I was in Low Earth Orbit and engaged the main thrusters to take the XR5 Ravenstar out to an altitude of 700,000 km (outside of Earth's SOI); I then did a retrograde burn and engaged the...

What is the Earth's sphere of influence in Orbiter? I couldn't find that information in the manual. I'm trying to do a retrograde burn inside the Earth's SOI to trim the ship's radial and tangential velocities to zero relative to Earth. I may be mistaken but it appears that one must be inside...

Thank you Gary, you gave me the right answer! I was downloading Orbiter 2010 from the UK site http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/download.html which wasn't the 2010P1 edition. The XR2Ravenstar-1.5 scenario opened fine and I'm on my way to Mars starting from the ground on Earth! Peter

After installing the XR2Ravenstar-1.5 and trying to launch Orbiter with a scenario for that ship I get an error message saying "The procedure entry point ?Activate@LightEmitter@@QAEX_N@Z could not be located in the dynamic link library Orbiter.exe". I'm not sure if it's relevant but when I...

Thank you very much; this will add greatly to our perspective of the actual arrival of Messenger at Mercury.

Has anyone created a scenario file for the arrival of the Messenger spacecraft at Mercury this Thursday (3/17) at 8:45 PM EDT?

Alas we do not live in a perfect world; fortunately Martin has given us the tools needed to leave the world we do have far far behind.

How about a video-conference via webcam in which a dozen or so people each have 2 computers and 2 monitors operating simultaneously? One of the PCs would run Orbiter while the other would handle their webcam. People would initially aim their webcam at themselves to talk about what they've...

The interesting thing about the crater and parachute picture is that the spacecraft was almost 12 miles in front of the crater at the moment the image was acquired. The optics and angular relationships make it appear as though the spacecraft is entering the crater. Phoenix now sits atop the...

Here is a color image of the Phoenix Lander on the ground on Mars as imaged from orbit by the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter. The image was acquired from a distance of approximately 187 miles. Notice the two solar panels extending from opposite sides of Phoenix.

The first ever image of a Mars spacecraft as it parachutes down to the surface is shown. The image of Phoenix on its parachute was acquired by the HI Rise camera on the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter as it passed overhead. A truly spectacular technical feat.

Viking 1 landed at 7:53 AM EDT which I remember because I was getting ready to leave for the bicentennial events that day in DC. When I got to the elevator of my building I said to the first person I met that "we" had just landed on Mars. He looked at me as though I was the one from Mars :)...

Not really. I was watching live coverage of the Viking 1 landing event on July 4, 1976. Transmission of the first surface image began 25 seconds after landing and took about 4 minutes. During those 4 minutes the Viking lander deployed a high-gain antenna and pointed it to Earth for direct...

If you will be following the Phoenix landing using Orbiter with Brian Jones' add-on spacecraft the time to start the simulation is 6:24 PM EDT. http://library.avsim.net/search.php?SearchTerm=phoenix+mars&CatID=root The simulation takes 1 hour and 14 minutes to run from its starting point...

Here's a series of screenshots that I snapped from a number of selected angles as I ran Brian Jones' excellent Phoenix Mars Mission package for Orbiter. Good job Brian!