Finally, Jool
Finally after many years of travel our Jool probe has entered the
Joolvian system.
We were going to try aerobraking but rumor has it that you can't do that
anymore with 1.0.x KSP, so we adjusted our perapsis back up to 200km or so.
Then we did our braking run low over the clouds to take advantage of
the Oberth effect.
We also encountered the weird phantom acceleration bug (feature?) when under
1000km.
We took some science too, only to realize we forgot to put batteries on
our probe so that we can only transmit partial results at a slow trickle.
Ugh.
Anyway, Jool orbit! Time to split the probes and aim them at their
various destinations:
Tylo!
Voll!
Laythe! (this one was tricky as we were in a Jool eclipse and had barely
enough electricity to make it to perapsis for the firing)
Bop!
Wow that went well, despite some really weird maneuver node issues and
disappearing (but still valid) encounters. There's even still hope
we can finish things up and get the original booster to Pol. If only
we had enough electricity to send data back in an efficient manner.
With the Jool probes more or less sorted for now, let's see what else needs
attention:
- Did a fairly expensive burn to get the Eelo probe on course, I though
it had been set up with an encounter already.
- Managed to finally get the Dres probe on an encounter. 4 years away
though?
- Mid-course correction for the DunaDestroyer™ so it also
now has an encounter.
- Poor Robert keeps looping by Moho without ever getting a good Kerbin
encounter.
- Jeb of course is still lost in space.
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