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Or, I can think of 3 cases where this should be easy, but would like a tool to give me times/dates to launch to take advantage of them: 1) The off-plane intercept. Launch from KSC into ~0° orbit, and do a transfer to Minmus, timing things so that I meet up with it at an ascending or descending node. I know that Minmus has to be near the "top" or "bottom" of its orbit for this to work, and can fiddle around equations to work out ~how many degrees away from the nodes it has to be, but would like a way to get launch times in UT. 2) Launching into a 6° orbit. KSC crosses the nodes of Minmus' orbit twice each day, so I can launch on a 96° or 84° (ish) heading but I'd like a way that's not eyeballing things in map view. 3) Launching east from Dessert. Dessert launch site is ~6.5° south, so once a day, a launch just before crossing the ascending node should be very close to Minmus' plane. But this has the same timing problem as 2. So... how? Can MechJeb or Kerbal Alarm Clock give me these times? Is there a table hidden away in the forums or reddit? A quick search was not the most promising. -
I am creating 2 spaceflight-related alternate histories which would include missions directly launched to Mercury. However, there has never been a direct mission to Mercury (all of them have used gravity assists), preventing me from using an existing launch and the synodic period to calculate their launch dates (the only method I know how to use). So, does anyone know any optimal launch dates for direct Mercury transfers? -
This thread is for the discussion of Aldrin Cycler Ships. First of all, an introduction to the topic- since most readers on this forum are undoubtedly unfamiliar with the concept, and the last time I wrote about it (many months ago) I received a lot of responses from people who clearly had no idea what they were talking about... Please read ALL of the following first, before commenting, I would really appreciate it. None of these are that long, and are only meant to provide a preliminary introduction to the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler https://buzzaldrin.com/space-vision/rocket_science/aldrin-mars-cycler/ https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3880/what-uses-would-the-aldrin-cycler-have And, for more context I HIGHLY RECOMMEND reading these articles: http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a333/2076326/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-martian-express/ Please read through at least the first three links, and the fourth and fifth ones if you can, and let me know your thoughts on the concept: advantages or disadvantages, synergies with other approaches/technologies, etc. Regards, Northstar
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If a spacecraft is travelling in a circular orbit around a planet with a gravitational parameter of G at radius R1, and wishes to make a 90 degree planes change to a circular orbit of R2, what is the optimal burn strategy? For example, a simple inclination burn followed by a circularization burn might be correct. If the gravity is very high, it might be correct to push the orbit far away from the planet do the plane change, and then come back. Since there are two burns, there are opportunities to spread the inclination change across both burns. How can an optimal split be made?
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When entering the SOI of a planet, we'd like to start our retrograde burn as close to periapsis as possible and with a low periapsis. For craft with low TWR, this will result in inefficiency, because you must start the burn pretty far away. My suspicion is that the greater you are from the true anomaly of 0 (Pe = True Anomaly of 0 degrees) the less efficient it is. What is the equation that gives the efficiency of a finite burn compared to an equivalent impulse burn?
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