C
CalliArcale
Guest
Hello!<br /><br />I don't know how many folks may be interested in this, but I happened to mention it in a thread in Free Space about Iapetus, and as it was not topical there, I thought I'd provide a place to discuss it here. It's really cool.<br /><br />Martin Lo was the original navigation manager for the Genesis project. (He has since moved on to other things, now that the primary mission is complete. There is a new navigation manager who presumably is watching the Exodus mission, which is using the spacecraft bus from Genesis that is still in space.) There's a fascinating interview with him on the Genesis website: Martin Lo interview. Unusually for such a role, he is not an engineer. He's a mathematician specializing in chaos theory. The trajectory he designed for Genesis meant that after a successful launch, the spacecraft could (theoretically) cruise uncontrolled to L1, complete the planned sequence of halo orbits, and drop naturally back towards Earth on a path to land in Utah <i>with no intervention from human controllers, and no thruster firings</i>. As it is, there were a few slight trajectory corrections to improve the aim, especially at the end of the mission and to push the spacecraft bus so it would miss Earth after the reentry canister separated. He describes it as a collision orbit -- it's planned to smack into Earth.<br /><br />Theoretically, he says you could plan a mission that went anywhere in the solar system without any fuel expenditure after the initial boost (apart from minor tweaks as the spacecraft flies past asteroids with more chaotic orbits). You could also use it to move asteroids towards the Earth, a feat which would normally require far more thrust than our technology can reasonably provide. It's a principle which is demonstrated all the time in our solar system. The return of the Apollo 12 S-IVB booster occured using Lo's "Interplanetary S <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>