Cosmic collisions

[george7378]

Hi everyone,

I recently arrived at Jupiter and parked in an orbit roughly equivalent to Europa. I then planned a close fly-by of Jupiter and broughy my periapsis down to around 10,000KM. As I descended, I noticed that my SurfaceMFD had switched to Io, and that I was closing in with disturbing speed. I continued on, and missed by a comfortable distance which allowed me to watch the volcanic features of Io pass by over 1000KM away, but the suprise flyby made me wonder - has anyone else ever hit anything by accident, like a Jovian moon or Earth's moon as you were ejecting from Eart orbit?

 

[Hmuda]

There was a not-too-long-ago thread about someone hitting the Moon while going to Mars I think. As it turns out one of the scenarios is set up in a way, that it happened to a few people.

 

[hribek]

I think someone managed to hit another planet with an object accelerated by UCGO nuke.

 

[Izack]

I've crashed into all sorts of things in my time...
The most startling encounter was when I was once in an eccentric retrograde orbit around the Sun building a space station (don't even ask why ), and managed to pass within 50 000 km of Earth by accident. Needless to say, I had the daylights scared out of me and ended up way off course.

Solid splats include the Moon, Ganymede, Saturn, Phobos and even the Sun, all by accident. I guess some people just really shouldn't be astronauts.

 

[mohammednasim]

Nope. Not just yet. *sigh*

 

[Urwumpe]

I managed to hit the moon on a glorious way to Saturn. It suddenly became dark and then loud.

 

[Izack]

I just remembered, that Earth encounter was what caused me to hit the Sun!

My perihelion had only been 50M before, and the offset caused by my impromptu slingshot lowered it to 10M. It managed to escape my attention, and a few orbits (and years) later...FWOOOOOM!!! Off to ε Eridani with you!!!

 

[Jarvitä]

Not a celestial body, but I passed within 20km of the ISS while trying to catch up with Mir, at over 50m/s.

 

[hribek]

So that's why it's so difficult to accurately predict conjunctions for the ISS. There are people in Delta Gliders among the space junk. I think that perhaps the best collision detector I've run into is the IMFD's Map program.