If you blow the pic up the captions read that its a file photo of a 2002 launch, so yes its a fake picture. Since its supposedly launched from french Guiana wouldn’t that mke it an American moon shot?
Fools!
This launch was real, but the “moon mission” is just a cover-up. This rocket is actually filled with nukes and has been sent to deflect Planet-X which is on a collision course with Earth.
How do I know this? The Zetans got tired of the freak that is Nancy Lieder and now communicate with me directly through my cats.
What, you mean it’s not an atomic bomb sent to Jupiter to turn it into a star? Damn!
South Dakota, eh?
My car won’t make the Mississippi River on 60 litres of propellant. This is preposterous!
No, because the Earth’s gravity would pull you into orbit. Escape velocity, IIRC, is how fast you’d need to travel to cause your orbital eccentricity to equal or exceed 1. With an *e[/e] of 1, the probe would simply fly out of Earth orbit. The European probe doesn’t have enough fuel to do that.
What it sounds like they’re doing is slowly increasing the probe’s semi-major axis until it’s way out there where the moon is.
Or a device to control the minds of those who wear tinfoil on their heads?
There’s a lot less wind resistance and road traction in space. 
No, because the Earth’s gravity would pull you into orbit. Escape velocity, IIRC, is how fast you’d need to travel to cause your orbital eccentricity to equal or exceed 1. With an e of 1, the probe would simply fly out of Earth orbit. The European probe doesn’t have enough fuel to do that.
What it sounds like they’re doing is slowly increasing the probe’s semi-major axis until it’s way out there where the moon is.
Or a device to control the minds of those who wear tinfoil on their heads?
There’s a lot less wind resistance and road traction in space.
First the BBC announces ‘Dr Who’ is going back into production, then these pictures show up? Coincidence? Bah!
:eek:
No, escape velocity is the initial velocity you’d need to give a ballistic object, like a cannonball, in order to escape the earth’s gravity permanently. A rocket can escape at considerably slower speeds, since it’s under power the whole way.
Bloody hell!
That makes sense!
I wonder why BBC had to use a stock photo, though. Did their roving reporter guy run out of memory sticks?
Why have the BBC suddenly got the blame for that reuters picture? I happen to know that they have more memory sticks than you can shake a stick at. So there.
V
aryk29: Who said they were using incandescent flashlights? Many people have flashlights powered by a Luxeon Star LED that produces a blazing, pure-white light that is very tightly focused. Besides, as I mentioned, it’s obvious that someone just played with an image contrast filter in Photoshop
While QED has already pointed out that escape velocity only applies to objects that don’t use acceleration of their own, let me elaborate a little, and pick a little nit.
If you want to get something out of earth orbit, and you can only accelerate it one time, and that time is limited to a fairly small fraction of the time the object will spend in transit, then you have to get it up to escape velocity or it will fall back to earth, or back into an orbit around the earth.
But if your object can accelerate continuously you can go at pretty much any speed you want. You could walk to the moon if you could get traction, or climb a ladder if it were long and strong enough. There is absolutely no requirement that you have to get up to escape velocity to escape the gravitational pull of the earth, or any other object.
For example, if your rocket can push you away from the earth at 1 mph, and can keep this up for 25 to 30 years, you could get to the moon without ever going over 1 mph.
And you don’t even have to burn your engines constantly. You just have to burn them enough so that on average you keep going away from the earth. You could burn your engines to get up to some speed, and then coast until you get back to zero (or even go backwards slightly if you don’t mind wasting the energy you already burned), then fire then engines again, repeat ad infinitum and go anywhere in the universe at the speed of a brisk walk, two steps forward and one step back.
Now to pick that nit. QED says that “A rocket can escape at considerably slower speeds, since it’s under power the whole way”. This should be “A rocket could escape at considerably slower speeds, since it could conceivably be under power the whole way”.
While this is theoretically possible, I don’t think it’s ever been done. Certainly the 1960s moon launches all used a slightly modified version of the “ballistic object” approach. That is, they accelerated twice, once to earth orbit, and then again to escape velocity and then coasted the entire way to the moon.
So while you don’t have to get to escape velocity to get out of earth orbit, I think this is the way it’s always been done, at least until now. It will be very interesting to watch how this new probe does.
Alereon, how dumb am I? I even have a white LED so I know what they look like. Yet I never thought to mention an LED flashlight. :smack:
This is really cool - they’re testing a new electric (solar powered) propulsion system for future deep space missions. Basically, it can use only 60L of fuel to go to the moon, because almost all of the time it isn’t using the fuel for propulsion - it’s using the solar power. It just accelerates slowly, and takes a long time to build up speed. Hence the long time to get into lunar orbit (15 months).
And just to clarify - the launch vehicle (to get into Earth orbit, I’m assuming) was the Ariane 5 heavy lift launcher. On this launch, it had a payload of three items; from the website of the company that built the launcher and the moon probe:
This article comments on the lunar orbit it will have:
This website from the contractor who designed the probe has tons of information about the mission.
The orbit information is given there:
Sorry about the multiple posts - but I keep finding some more information. From one of the pages linked above, here a link to an animation of the early orbit phase (just before earth escape). Linky
Is this what aryk29 meant when they said “What it sounds like they’re doing is slowly increasing the probe’s semi-major axis until it’s way out there where the moon is.”?
From the animation, it looks like the earth-escape orbit is such that it is very eccentric, with a low perigee and high apogee (lowest point in the orbit, and highest point, respectively). Then they keep adding little boosts of energy to boost the apogee even higher - eventually into an orbit away from the earth. I am definitely not a physicist though (just read a lot of SF), so I might have screwed this up.
Actually I was thinking that they were going to keep it in a nearly circular orbit, and slowly increase the size of the orbit so that the probe would spiral out until it nears the Moon. But the video makes it clear what they’re actually doing.
Perilune, apolune. Leave it to the astronomers to come up with such terminology. 
I don’t mind the multiple posts. I appreciate the information.
Waitaminnit. They spent how many euro on a moon launch? And how many died in the heat wave?
I speak for The Land of Hideous Inequity. I call on our European brethren to dismount their 20-hand Andalusians and sit down for talks over a nice shit sundae.
I found this video most informative. Right around MJD1504, a close approach of the Moon perturbs the probe’s orbit. Finally, around MJD1595 the Moon captures the probe.
Neat!
Also it looks to me like they’re arranging the probe’s apogee to coincide with the Moon’s perigee.