How does Nasa send space vehicles to distant objects? Can you explain how:?
151761
To use the gravitational sling, all that NASA is doing is using the well known principles of celestial mechanics and orbits. Both the parabolic and hyperbolic orbits will enable a space vehicle to pass by gravitational body and escape. This requires some computing of course, but it is not that hard to do. One just needs to aim the craft in the right direction at the right speed. \n\nEven more interesting is the use of the chaos method. One can save energy by using chaos theory to send vehicles to distant objects. This is a bit less obvious than the "slingshot" or gravity assist, and is described in the first reference (I met and listened to some lectures by the chaos method's inventor; very interesting). NASA might be starting to use this method now that it has been proven by the Japanese and Europeans. NASA's JPL really hated the method when it first came out and fired the guy who invented it. He now is a tenured professor at Princeton. \n\n2. There are lots of power sources for space vehicles. Some are used currently and some are in the planning stages. Solid and liquid chemical rockets were very common and nuclear power as well. Solar sails and ion propulsion are going to be more prominent in the future, probably. \n\n3. Steering is done just as you would expect; Newton's third law, coupled with mechanism to control the direction of the ejecta. For tracking and control, the spacecraft send signals back and forth to us on earth using very sophisticated error correcting codes that use some very interesting mathematics. \n\n\n4. Well there are incidents where space craft are hit by debris, but obviously it does not happen very frequently or else it would be more of a problem, and accomodations for this would have to be made. Most of the failures of spacecraft are due to something else, I believe.
817981
As others have said, it's all about speed. \n\nIt's a minor point really, but it's a common misconception that it is the friction with the air that causes objects hitting the Earth's atmosphere at high speed to heat up. Actually it's not friction. The heating up is caused by the fact that the air in front of the object cannot get out of the way fast enough, so it's gets compressed in front of the object. As the air gets compressed the pressure rises and as the pressure rises so does the temperature. This is what causes the burning up effect.\n\nWhen a space craft is blasting off into orbit, as its speed rises it's also gaining altitude. At higher altitudes the atmosphere is less dense, so this compression of the air in front of the space craft never becomes a problem.\n\nIf a space craft used its rockets to slow its decent back to Earth then it wouldn't have any problems with burning up on re-entry. The reason they don't do this is because of the weight of the fuel that would be needed to do it. With current technology, no spacecraft could carry that amount of fuel and still be able to get into orbit.
410318
There is a resource located at http://www.drboylan.com/ that will assist you with your question.  Dr. Boylan has been researching this area for many years and describe the advances the U.S. has made from Space Visitor technology.  Some examples are the Stealth Bombers and War Ships.  Hope this helps.
315403
You would generate a ship capable of providing a mini-ecosystem capable of sustaining a self-replicating crew.  Astronauts have kids who become astronauts down the ages until the destination is reached.  \n\nAs far as drive mechanism, currently NASA is working on finalizing an ION drive that gets stuff to its destination faster than our current thruster tech by propelling them at an increasing rate of acceleration.
399520
In order to get out to Pluto in the time frame it is going to do it in (10 years?), the New Horizons probe needs to be traveling very fast....Pluto is a LONG way out there.\nPluto is also a pretty small planet, and thus doesnt have tha strong of a gravitational pull.\n\nSo you have the combination of a very fast moving probe going by a small planet.  I would be pretty hard to get tha thing into an orbit....it would take alot of energy to due to (slow it down, put it into an orbit trajectory).\nThat energy needs to be supplies somehow, by means of some fuel.  That fuel has mass which you need to carry all the way out to Pluto to use, all that extra mass costs more fuel in order to lauch and accelerate out to Pluto.\n\nIt is probably a money problem, it would probably be too expensive and complicated I am guessing, but it could be done.\nAlso, NASA really likes sending thins outside of our solar system as we dont really know much about what it is out there on the edge.  If your going to go all the way to Pluto, why not go farther?
36637
By giving them enough speed, depending on the altitude of orbit (the heightof elevation of an object above sea level). The higher the altitude of orbit, the higher amount of speed needed.\n\nIf satellite loses orbital speed, especially if the orbit is low, gravity steps in and the spacecraft soon plunges to Earth.
204509
Yes, through wormhole and warp drive. A wormhole should be able to connect distant locations in the universe by bending spacetime, allowing travel between them that is faster than it would take light to make the journey through normal space. \n\nA warp drive would be a mechanism for warping space-time in such a way that an object could move faster than light.\n\nIf you would like to learn more about wormhole, follow this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole
431855
Hi there!  I'm a physics and astronomy student, so, while I'm not the authority on the subject, I can tell you what my current understanding is:\n\nIt really all comes down to cost in my opinion.  We aren't sending astronauts to Mars primarily because it would cost a lot to get them there with current technologies and it would still take a while for the trip (it took about 7 months for the Mars rovers to get there).\n\nSome people also think it is unsafe because we haven't sent humans out nearly that far yet.  Messages would also take at least 8 minuets to get a response (I think Mars is about 4 light minuets away so it would take as long to transmit a signal to Earth and just as long for the response to get back).  That's kind of a pain but not a big problem in my mind.\n\nAs for sending probes further out, this is indirectly related to cost.  We are still only able to move so fast.  You can blame this on reduced funding for NASA if you like (or closed minded scientists perhaps).  \n\nWe have sent a few probes out to explore the outer planets of our own solar system but we can't expect to be exploring other stars and solar systems anytime soon because even the next closest star system is about 4.3 light years away.  If we could travel at the speed of light (which we definitely could not with current technology) it would take 4.3 years to get there.  (Using the relationship for Mars from earlier I'd guess that this means it would take oh...162,540 years (really rough estimate assuming I did the math correctly) with our current abilities, so sending humans would be silly since we rarely make it past 100).  This is connected to funding because, in theory, if we had more money we could come up with and actually use better ideas for space exploration, including faster means of travel.\n\nFinally, we can explore "visually".  We can collect different types of light (like visual light, infrared, x-ray, and ultra violet) and learn a lot about our universe that way.  Most of what we know about our universe comes from local collection and interpretation of this (like with Hubble).  This field is progressing at a reasonable rate as we developer better equipment for viewing very distant things in great detail.  It could also benefit from increased funding though.\n\nIn retrospect, I suppose that money might be the root of the issue, but until we figure out how to jet through space more quickly, so is time.
1023987
They don't have to. Yes, there are thousands of asteroids, but space is really, really big! The asteroids are so far apart that you could just randomly fly any path through the belt and never see one. They actually have to carefully plot a course to rendezvous with one if that is the goal of the mission, like NEAR or Hayabusa.
60306
hi there, you asked a nice question. \na simple-straight answer in layman terms to this would be that Mars Rover is remote-controlled from NASA.\n\nfor a more complex answer i would cite a website -\nThe rovers "talk" to Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor, which are constantly orbiting the red planet. In the 16 minutes it takes each orbiter to go from horizon to horizon, there is an opportunity for the rovers and orbiters to "converse" for about ten minutes.\nThe orbiters, with their more capable X-band communications systems, can transmit data back to Earth at a faster rate. This high performance is critical, as time on the large antennas here on Earth that were built to receive the data (the Deep Space Network) is limited given all of the spacecraft that rely on them.\n\nNow these telecommunication can be used to transfer data as well as give control commands to the Mars Rover, and this can be done by anyone who has access to NASA system.
39097
Check out the sites below for in-depth explanations.  \nThe first one is from NASA.
1109029
sending a probe to mars\n\nadvanced techniques in heart surgery
130717
A space craft is a vehicle that travels once in space. A   rocket is just a big, hot engine that is used to propel the space craft outside of Earth's gravitational pull. \n\nGood Luck!
418460
They can bounce light off and measure it, but I don't think they've done that with the distant planets.  Redshift only works with huge distances like distant stars that are hundreds or millions of light years away.\n\nThink of the hundreds (and thousands) of years that humans have been keeping track of the movements of the planets.  Mathematicians can use these records to determine how far away from the sun these planets must be in order to move the way they do in the sky,  after all this is how they figured out that they all move around the sun instead of the earth.\n\nOnce you know roughly how far away these planets are from the sun and how far the earth is from the sun, you can determine the range of distances from the earth.  Sometimes the planets can be in line with us between them and the sun and be close.  Sometimes they are on the complete opposite side of the sun and are at their most distant.\n\nNow, of course, we have satellites that have gone around every planet and it's easy to figure out how long signals take to get to them and back.  But we knew the distances already or else the satellites would never have gotten there.
565184
The planets in our system are way, way too small to do anything like this. It would take something with the density of a black hole (or perhaps just a neutron star) to do something like this.
433264
Objects orbit one another because they have a curved trajectory that results from the vector addition of their momentum (in the direction of travel, tangential to the orbit) and the gravitational attraction to the other object (normal to the orbit).\n\nThis vector is constantly changing in direction (but not to any significant degree in magnitude) because of the object's motion, but it always keeps the satellite's acceleration pointed towards the object is it orbiting, resulting in smooth, roughly circular motion.
993183
First you will need to know when it will pass over. You can see where it is now at this website.\n\nhttp://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/\n\nAt night, when the sun hits it at the right angle, the station appears as a fairly bright bluish white light. It does not flash like an airplane, and takes roughly three minutes or so to traverse the sky.\n\nIf it's bright enough you can see it with the naked eye. You may also use binoculars but you may not be able to make out any detail without a telescope (which wouldn't be easy to get a lock on the station with because it moves so fast).