Talk:Helios (spacecraft)

Some questions

 * 1) Gm being Gigameters?
 * 2) What happened with the space probes?

Gigameters is a rather bizarre scale to use. Kilometers is the standard for measuring distances in the solar system. Meters is only used in astronomical conventions when it is in exponential format.

There is no "natural" scale for anything, much less the inner solar system. They are all artificial. --Abdull 19:09, 28 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I can't recall ever seeing the term in any scientific text. The only other place I've seen it is in lists of orders of magnitude relative to the meter.  I Googled, and found about 946 total references to "gigameters/gigametres" and about 8,970,000 references to "million kilometers/million kilometres."  There's apparently at least one user who's married to the idea of using gigameters in this article; I'd appreciate him/her giving us some links to some scientific texts that use the term.  Otherwise I say we drop it from the article. Dyfsunctional 12:05, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
 * This is the SI official unit (prefix+meter), even if not often used. Giving the equivalence in au would be more useful. --ArséniureDeGallium 17:18, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I would agree that the AU is probably the best unit for distances inside the solar system. However, a quick peek at some of the other articles about solar system objects shows that gigameters (and a few other unwieldy prefix+meter units) have been used quite liberally in the WP, so there may be some kind of consensus that I'm not aware of.  Also, if you look closely, the phrases "one gigameter" and "one million kilometers" identically follow the SI number+prefix+base unit formula. Dyfsunctional 03:56, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Fly a light year
How many years would it take for this craft to fly one light year? 4.240.42.88 23:57, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * It would take it 4269.3315 years . Ariel. 09:28, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Fastest Man-made Object
Fastest man-made object redirects here but, assuming this is correct, it is not adequately covered by the article. Although I appreciate that "set in the mid-1970's a maximum speed record among spacecraft at 252,792 km/h" implies fastest man-made object (or at least that it was about 35 years ago), I feel it should be spelt out if it is going to be a redirect. 81.23.54.142 (talk) 04:12, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree it should be spelt out. This issue is described in various places in the article about the New Horizons spacecraft. --Mortense (talk) 13:23, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Expansion
It would be nice if this article could be expanded. For instance, with mission objectives, development history, what orbital maneuvers were made to put into the final orbit, scientific results, etc. Should it be marked with the template "... is a stub and "? --Mortense (talk) 13:17, 2 January 2011 (UTC)


 * I'll put this on my list of to-dos. It'll be after finishing the Mars Surveyor orbiter and lander however.  I'll probably start researching it in a week or two.  --Xession (talk) 17:34, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

As it is now two years later and nothing has been done, I'd like to again request that this article, which appears to have started as an article covering Helios 2 only be properly expanded to cover the entire program, preferably with separate articles for each satellite. Graham1973 (talk) 10:11, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Distance travelled by helios
If we say as it is written in the webpage about Helios; the fastest space craft in the world which has attained the top speed of 252,792 km ph, so keeping the same in view and it was launched some 39 years ago and maintaining the same speed it would have by now travelled well over 86 billion kilometres which is way far away from the sun which is hardly 148 million kilometres so right now where is this space craft roaming can anybody tell me please. If we calculated the speed of the craft mentioned above and multiply it with 39 years it comes to 86,363,858,880 kilometres and it is still moving so where is it now! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pinelights (talk • contribs) 10:04, 18 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The probes are in a heliocentric orbit, i.e. circling the sun. As opposed to the Voyager 1 & 2 probes, which are moving away from the solar system, the Helios probes stayed inside Earth's orbit, and will remain to do so. They are going nowhere, so to speak. -- DevSolar2 (talk) 15:20, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

the results section does not entirely make sense.
the wording of the results section is odd. not sure the author was an english speaker, or perhaps they rushed?

if someone who know the topic could have a scan and correct a bunch of the errors it would be cool 82.9.94.243 (talk) 07:33, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Second half of sentence
I've attempted to correct the following sentence, but I could not make sense of its second half, the part after the comma. Therefore, I deleted it. If someone can interpret it, and rewrite it into comprehensible form, please do so, and add it back. The original sentence was as follows: "Changes in signal propagation resulting from the solar corona cross provided information on the density fluctuations, travel speeds of the crown structures 1.7 sunbeam."

The use of the word "crown" is probably meant to mean the solar corona (which was translated correctly, in the front half of the sentence). catsmoke (talk) 10:03, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Clarification reference
The reference cited at the beginning of the "Experiments and instruments" section (i.e., this document) should be useful in cleaning up the mess and dealing with many of the needed clarifications. Thtatithticth (talk) 07:21, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Choice of English variant
The article is currently a big mix of American and British English. (E.g. I see instances of "realize", "vaporize", "ionize", "polarize, "analyze", and "meter"; but also many of "analyse" and "metre".) Per MOS:ARTCON, we should pick one and stick with it through the article. Does anybody have a preference for which one?

I'm leaning towards American because it seems more common in this article, but I think either should be fine. Thtatithticth (talk) 03:44, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Given no arguments for a week, I've converted the remaining spellings to American English and added the appropriate templates. Thtatithticth (talk) 07:44, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Measure zodiac light in white light? What?
Maybe I misunderstood the statement, or I am lacking information, but in "Other instruments" / "Zodiacal light photometer" the following statement isn't clear.

" measure the intensity and polarization of the zodiac light in white light and in the 550 nm and 400 nm wavelength bands "

What does "white light" mean? Is it a specific wavelengths, a range of wavelength or a separate form of light? I guess it tries to be the first one. Cozmos22 (talk) 19:17, 20 December 2020 (UTC)