Kerbal Space Program Moho Probe Part 2
0I'm back with more Kerbal Space Program after the accident last time to try to navigate the probe to Moho and the sun.
We start off just as the probe is leaving Kerbin influence on a path that will get it close to Moho's orbit, but not at the correct inclination. So we let it travel for 61 days to the ascending node where we perform a correction burn. While setting up the burn, I notice that we won't be too far from an encounter. So I keep adjusting the node until I get an encounter.
This however turns out to be one of the longest burns and the most delta-V that we have ever done. Over 3500 m/s change in speed! It will be a burn of a bit over an hour. Doing some quick math, it appears that we do have the delta-V for the burn, but it will use about 90% of our fuel. We decide to go for it.
We time warp out to the burn, and start the burn. In game we are doing 4x physical warp, with a bit over 8x of post video speedup to get through the burn in a reasonable amount of time. The music is 'Microchip' by Jason Farnham. At the end of the burn, we make a few adjustments to get our intercept down to about 100 km.
Once the burn is done, we coast along our trajectory until we are close to Moho. The way we are approaching it makes it hard to see in the glare of the sun until we are almost on top of it. At 3 hours out, we do a small burn to get the intercept down to under 20 km. Our intercept is only going to be about 25 minutes, and this is because of a combination of Moho's low gravity and our speed.
As we enter Moho's influence, we still can't see it due to the glare of the sun, but about 3 minutes from closest approach, we begin to see it. We start gathering some gravity scans, but save the goo canister and materials bay for our closest point to get close to Moho science. That works, and we get reading from the goo canister, materials bay, thermometer, and a gravity scan. We broadcast that back to Kerbin, and get some good views of Moho as we leave.
Our trajectory takes up about 2.4 million meters from the sun about 11 days past Moho. This isn't enough for close to sun science, so we plan a burn at our apoapsis, in 65 days. We will burn the remainder of our fuel in order to lower our periapsis as much as possible.
We do the burn and run out of fuel with our periapsis just under 2 million km from the sun. We time warp around to our periapsis, but find we are still too far to get 'close' science. It seems we spent too much fuel getting to Moho to be able to get close to sun science.
We will have to send another mission if we want close to sun science, but that will be another episode.
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