Share your Gravity Assists

[KerikBalm]

Thread title shows it all.

I had a E class asteroid coming in from well outside the equatorial plane, an aerocapture would give me a horrendous longitude of ascending node, requiring a lot of dV to change to a nice equatorial orbit (I wanted to give kerbin another moon in a regular orbit). After a gravity assist to temporarily capture it, I did a number of gravity assists to lower its orbit... but at some point I forgot to take notice of whether it was in a prograde or retrograde orbit... I ended up with the E-class asteroid in an equatorial retorgrade orbit and an Ap just beyond munar orbit.

So... for about 11 m/s I set up another encounter with Mun, another 15 m/s to get a very low pass... and I hada  gravity assist turning a retrograde orbit with almost no inclination into a prograde orbit with almost no inclination... and a PE under the surface of Kerbin... an ±85 m/s maneuver at Munar perapsis was planned to fix it... I'm pretty sure that ended up being much cheaper than boosting Apoapsis and doing a reversal at apoapsis. Anyway... I can in.. reallly low over Mun, and wanted to share pictures and see what others have done. (I wonder if this may also fit in showcase or mission reports?)

*Note, I did not want to mine from the asteroid, I wanted the asteroid to get into a nice non inclined orbit fully loaded with ore.

I tried the approach twice, as I had problems keeping the thing pointing the right direction on the first one (used RCS more on the 2nd one)

Mun, meet mini-mun:

Looks like a new crater may be in the making

 

Altitude increasing again:

 

Attempt 2, burning earlier

clearing the crater rim:

LV-N's getting hot

Going up... need to refine some onboard ore (not mined from the roid) into more oxidizer to keep the roid under control... it all worked out and I was in a nice 55km aeorbraking orbit with enoguh dV to raise the Pe later (though I had a relief asteroid tug waiting to rendevous with the roid and get the orbit circular)

Gravity assists and munar oberth effect is fun