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May 10 2018

Extremis Phase Two Planning Extended

Phase Two began back at the end of February and calculations were completed last week to give mission planners 71 trajectories to review – 3 were found to be not feasible due to increasing the closest distance from the sun the spacecraft was allowed to travel. Unfortunately we made an error in the last report where we said the fly-bys that included Moho and Plock were in separate years – they are both in the 2020-2021 launch year. However this ended up not mattering since the fly-by that includes Moho would require an obscene 14.752km/s of delta-V to achieve, one of 14 trajectories that exceeded the 3km/s mission constraint after the new calculations. Of the options remaining, only one mission so far has been selected, which will launch in August of 2021 and perform a fly-by of Eve, Jool and Plock that will take just under 3 years at a cost of 2.6km/s of delta-V.

Mission planners will now return to calculating possible fly-by trajectories for 2019 and 2020 that exclude these three planets to see if we can find any other possible combinations under 3km/s of delta-V that have not yet been explored, like a route from Kerbin>Duna>Sarnus>Urlum/Neidon.