The weird name comes from a contraction of “balloon” and “parachute.” The only thing in that movie is that they were also using it as a heat shield in the front which would be a control problem beyond imagining, not to mention having to get rid of all that heat without “popping” the balloon.

They were invented for (and this is really what they’re called) “retarded bombs,” i.e. bombs that you want to drop at relatively low altitudes and not have shrapnel from the detonation hit your plane. The ballutes pop out the back and inflate into a really high-drag configuration that slows the bomb down in a hurry without all of the high-speed deployment problems of parachutes, not to mention simpler one-piece construction.

- Jack

A ballute is an aerobreaking device. If you watch the movie 2010, the spaceship Leonov uses a ballute, a big inflated balloon, to increase the ship’s surface area and induce drag in the Jovian upper-atmosphere. It bleeds off orbital energy without using costly rocket propellant.

Could almost do a ballute braking Pluto lander once we understand Pluto’s atmosphere better thanks to NH. Unfortunately we now know that there’s a spot on the Moon that’s colder than Pluto’s surface… so the lander site will no longer be the COOLEST vantage point in Sol-Space!

There’s somewhere on our Moon that’s even colder than Pluto? Really? Where? I missed that news.

I’m guessing it must be in one of those permanently shadowed craters where they think there might be lunar water ice .. right?

Can’t help think there must be similar craters out on Pluto that should be even colder!
‘Spose we’ll have to wait for New Horizons to get there to find out ..if then.

Oh & “ballute” – what’s that mean? I’m scratching my head over that one.

“…Marc Buie [astronomer specialising in Pluto - ed] can very easily imagine what it must be like to walk around on Pluto: with less than 1% of your weight on Earth because of the low gravity, at temperatures of 230 degrees below zero, in the twilight because the Sun is nothing more than a dazzling star in the black sky, across snowfields of methane ice and transparent crystals of frozen nitrogen and with a gigantic moon hanging overhead – at least if you are on the right side of the planet.”
- Page 61, ‘The Hunt For Planet X’, Govert Schilling, Copernicus Books, 2009.

“… he had left out a planet. It was not his fault; everyone leaves it out. I leave it out myself when I list the nine planets, because it is the four-and-a-halfth planet. I’m referring to Ceres; a small but respectable world that doesn’t deserve the neglect it receives.”
- Page 63, chapter 5 “The World Ceres” in ‘The Tragedy of the Moon’ by
Isaac Asimov, Mercury Press, 1973.

Once thought to be rocky, we now believe Ceres may contain 200 million cubic kilometres of water in its mantle. This is more than the amount of fresh water on the Earth.
- Page 10, “Ceres may be a failed miniplanet” by Jeff Foust in Astronomy Now magazine, November, 2005.

@ 28. kevin b halse Says:

Something I found:

“If the Milky Way galaxy was the size of a grain of salt, the visible universe would be about 3 [American] football fields wide. If our solar system was the size of a gain of salt, the Milky Way galaxy would be 24 miles in diameter. If Earth were the size of a grain of salt, our solar system would be 2 football fields wide. … etc … ”

Great size comparisons – thanks!

Where did you find that out – please could you let me know what your source(s) was for that?

“If you put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, that cathedral will be more densely packed with grains of sand than stars are found apart in space.”
- Sir James Jeans, British astronomer, quoted on page 28, ‘Skywatching’, David H. Levy, Ken Fin Books, 1995.

“…about 40 supernovae are exploding somewhere in the universe every second. However, light from most of these events won’t reach Earth for billions of years, if ever.”
- Page 73, “Ask Astro” in ‘Astronomy’ magazine October 2008.

“Cosmology also tells us that there are perhaps 100 billion galaxies in the universe and that each contains roughly 100 billion stars. By a curious co-incidence, 100 billion is also the approximate number of cells in a human brain.”
- Page 237, ‘StarGazer’, Dr Fred Watson, Allen & Unwin, 2004.

If you got in an airplane (which typically travels at 500 mph) and tried to fly to Pluto, it would take 650 years. And that’s with no layovers. BIG.

Cool.

What’s your source for that if I may ask?

A few interesting quotes that also put things in perspective here:

“Space isn’t remote at all. Its only an hour away if your car could go straight upwards.”
- Page 43, Sir Fred Hoyle, ‘The Wonderful World of Space’, Heather Couper, Octopus Books, 1980.

But …

“If it were possible to drive straight from the Earth to Neptune, taking the shortest possible route and keeping up a steady 60 m.p.h., the journey would take nearly 5,200 years.”

- Page 57, ‘The Sky at Night’, Patrick Moore, WW. Norton & Co, 1986.

&

Since our Sun was formed more than 4 billion years ago, it has travelled around the Galaxy 16 times.
- “Two of the Milky Way’s Spiral Arms Go Missing” , NASA e-newsletter news release 2008-June-4th.