SENTINEL Telescope Contract

[K3rb0dyn3]

I just accepted a contract which I have to use the Sentinel telescope to map out 14 Kerbin threatening asteroids over the inclination of 16°.

According to the contract, the mapping process would happen over time. What does this mean? And what should I do now, I have already put the sentinel telescope in the given orbit between Eve and Kerbin. Do I have to still track them in the tracking station or do I just leave it to do it in the background?

Lastly, what defines Kerbin threatening asteroids?

[bewing]

3 hours ago, K3rb0dyn3 said:

I just accepted a contract which I have to use the Sentinel telescope to map out 14 Kerbin threatening asteroids over the inclination of 16°.

According to the contract, the mapping process would happen over time. What does this mean? And what should I do now, I have already put the sentinel telescope in the given orbit between Eve and Kerbin. Do I have to still track them in the tracking station or do I just leave it to do it in the background?

Lastly, what defines Kerbin threatening asteroids?

Once the SENTINEL telescope is in the right orbit, you go into its context menu and click the "Start Object Tracking" button. The rest of the process is entirely automated. You will receive a message on your screen every few dozen days or so saying that the telescope just found one more asteroid that fit the required profile. There is nothing you can do to speed the process up. You do not need to do anything after you receive a message. After maybe half a year, the contract will complete all by itself.

"Kerbin threatening" means that the asteroid eventually passes through Kerbin's SOI, AFAIK.

 

Edited April 11, 2019 by bewing

[K3rb0dyn3]

2 hours ago, bewing said:

Once the SENTINEL telescope is in the right orbit, you go into its context menu and click the "Start Object Tracking" button. The rest of the process is entirely automated. You will receive a message on your screen every few dozen days or so saying that the telescope just found one more asteroid that fit the required profile. There is nothing you can do to speed the process up. You do not need to do anything after you receive a message. After maybe half a year, the contract will complete all by itself.

 "Kerbin threatening" means that the asteroid eventually passes through Kerbin's SOI, AFAIK.

Ok I will try that out.

[Jarmo]

I added a second sentinel satellite on the opposing side of the orbit, thinking it might speed up the process.
Does anyone know if it does? 

[TheTripleAce3]

7 hours ago, Jarmo said:

I added a second sentinel satellite on the opposing side of the orbit, thinking it might speed up the process.
Does anyone know if it does? 

It will in theory do so, but your best bet is just putting a scope in a fairly low solar orbit and having the scope pointing away from the sun so it effectively gets a wider FOV (not sure if actually modeled but makes sense to me for general asteroid hunting).

Edited April 11, 2019 by TheTripleAce3

[K3rb0dyn3]

9 hours ago, bewing said:

Once the SENTINEL telescope is in the right orbit, you go into its context menu and click the "Start Object Tracking" button. The rest of the process is entirely automated. You will receive a message on your screen every few dozen days or so saying that the telescope just found one more asteroid that fit the required profile. There is nothing you can do to speed the process up. You do not need to do anything after you receive a message. After maybe half a year, the contract will complete all by itself.

"Kerbin threatening" means that the asteroid eventually passes through Kerbin's SOI, AFAIK.

Thanks that worked!

Btw the deadline is 648y later and i already got 8 asteroids within a year.

[Jarmo]

5 hours ago, K3rb0dyn3 said:

Thanks that worked!

Btw the deadline is 648y later and i already got 8 asteroids within a year.

What's nice, is you'll probably get more asteroid mapping missions later and you don't need to do anything to accomplish then, the existing sentinel will map them as well.

[bewing]

True, except that as you explore more planets you will also get Sentinel contracts for them -- and then you will need to decide whether to move your current craft to a new orbit (each planet has its own fairly specific orbit where the Sentinel needs to be located), or whether to launch a new one.

[K3rb0dyn3]

43 minutes ago, bewing said:

True, except that as you explore more planets you will also get Sentinel contracts for them -- and then you will need to decide whether to move your current craft to a new orbit (each planet has its own fairly specific orbit where the Sentinel needs to be located), or whether to launch a new one.

 

Yeah ok, but how much can you get out of 2234m/s on my sentinel telescope? can I place it in an orbit of Duna or Jool, or an orbit between Moho and Eve.

[bewing]

A Sentinel contract for Duna requires an orbit a bit above Kerbin's -- I suspect that you could make it there and still have some deltaV left.

[K3rb0dyn3]

59 minutes ago, bewing said:

A Sentinel contract for Duna requires an orbit a bit above Kerbin's -- I suspect that you could make it there and still have some deltaV left.

Ok thanks because I just went to Duna so I am expecting some contracts about the planet. 

[Hamfisted]

Found a trick with this one that MIGHT work for you... I had a Sentinel satellite out there FOREVER in the right orbit and I could only get 11/15 mapped (this mapping mission was for Kerbin-threatening asteroids in an orbit around the Sun).

I was orbiting the Sun with Duna behind me and Kerbin in front of me. When I clicked on the Sentinel unit itself, and turned off/turned back on tracking, it said something about "tracking objects near Duna".

On a whim, I decided to get closer to Kerbin in my orbit thinking "maybe I'm too close to Duna?"--eyeballing the map from above, it looked like I *was* a little closer to Duna than Kerbin. I burned prograde to drop my orbit inside of Kerbin's to "catch up" and within just a few moments I saw messages "tracked 12/15, 13/15, etc." pop up at the top of the screen. Within 10 seconds I got to 15/15 and the parameter completed.

However, my orbit was off so I time accelerated to Periapsis and put my orbit back where it belonged. This was unnecessary as the orbit part of the mission basically already counted itself as complete and lo and behold, the *entire mission* was already complete!

My theory is, I was sitting in the same spot for a long time with no new asteroids, so changing my orbit was like going fishing for more asteroids and I caught a bunch really quickly. Give it a try, can't hurt--as long as your Sentinel sat is well-stocked with fuel of course! The prograde burn to drop my orbit from 14mm to 13mm from the Sun cost about 350 m/s of dV.

[Zhetaan]

@Hamfisted:

Here's the key to making it work:

13 hours ago, Hamfisted said:

I burned prograde to drop my orbit inside of Kerbin's to "catch up"

The Sentinel telescope works by scanning on behalf of the next planet farther out.  This means that to scan for asteroids for Kerbin, it needs to be between Kerbin and Eve.  If your telescope was saying that it was tracking objects near Duna, then its orbit was too high:  it was between Kerbin and Duna, not Kerbin and Eve.

How does it know which planet is the next farther out?  There's no single orbital altitude when an orbit is eccentric (and don't forget that Eeloo is actually closer to the Sun than Jool for a portion of its orbit).  However, it can compare semi-major axes.  The telescope knows the semi-major axis of its own orbit, and it knows the semi-major axes of the planets' orbits, and so it tracks objects 'near' the body with the next larger semi-major axis than its own orbit.

Thus, what happened with you is that when you burned to bring your telescope's orbit down, you reduced its semi-major axis to a value just below Kerbin's, and so the telescope began tracking objects for Kerbin rather than Duna.

On the other hand, this:

13 hours ago, Hamfisted said:

My theory is, I was sitting in the same spot for a long time with no new asteroids, so changing my orbit was like going fishing for more asteroids and I caught a bunch really quickly.

... is not the answer.  There's no list of discoverable asteroids; the game generates them at random.  You cannot 'fish out' the asteroids from one orbit in the same way that the stock science sensors (thermometer etc.) can only extract a specific number of science points for a given experiment in a given biome.  So long as one leaves the telescope in the right orbit and tracking objects, it should continue to do so indefinitely.  Considering that it's been three and a half years, I certainly hope that that was enough time.