How do I capture this asteroid?

[WhiteWeasel]

Awesome name aside, it has a wonderfully low periapsis which I could use for aerobraking but I can't figure out how to rendezvous with it. Mechjeb put me in the same orbit and inclination with it.

Edited April 5, 2014 by WhiteWeasel

[makinyashikino]

It's pretty hard to see anything in that picture, what is your orbit? Are you on the same plane as it? Are you travelling in the same direction as the asteroid? If you are in the same plane and are travelling the same direction, what you are going to want to do is get an encounter at the asteroid's periapsis, and as you get to the encounter, burn to match speeds, you might end up behind if you start your burn too late so you will have to either start the burn a few minutes early or catch up to it, unless you have a very high TWR. Keep in mind, it will be going at least 1 km/s faster than you, so be careful and try not to get hit by it!

EDIT: I'm dumb and didn't read the second sentence of your post duhhhh, so just ignore the 1st part of mine.

Edited April 3, 2014 by Cavenyanson
im dumb

[JumpsterG]

(I need to play this update! Arg!)

What follows would be any easy way to rendezvous with the asteroid, but you will meet up with it AFTER it passes periapse. It can still be slowed into a stable orbit, but not with the help of the atmosphere.

I understand there is a new feature of the maneuver nodes, such that you can set them for future orbits. I haven't seen what this feature looks like, but if you get your orbit to touch the asteroid's periapse, then place a maneuver node there, you'll be able to see a few orbits into the future and find where the asteroid reaches or passes the periapse.

Once you've found it, go back one orbit and use the same node to adjust your orbit in or out a bit (pulling on prograde/retrograde) until the projected closest approach is as close as you want it (within 5-10 kilometers should be pretty good). What you're doing is increasing or decreasing your orbital period, so it takes more or less time for you to swing back around the planet to meet up with the asteroid as it arrives.

Once you start getting close to that closest approach, you switch to target mode and start burning hard at target retrograde (to match velocity with the asteroid). A maneuver node can help you gauge how long a burn will be needed, just try to get the projected orbit to more or less match the asteroid's path by pulling on prograde.

Once relative velocity gets close to zero, you can then burn toward the pink target to start your final approach, then time warp and adjust as necessary until you're close enough to do your final braking maneuver.

It's possible to meet up with the asteroid earlier, but the periapse is the easiest place to plan a rendezvous for (you match your periapse with it's) and match velocities (you're already moving as fast as your orbit allows in the same direction as the asteroid).

To meet it earlier, you'd want to set a maneuver to put your apoapse near the asteroid's path so that you get a close approach there or somewhere after it. This could take some fiddling to get right, and I have not had the chance to play with it to find the best way, yet. You'll also need more dV for this kind of rendezvous, but you might make up for it if you are able to then make the asteroid aerobrake for capture.

Good luck! Hope some of this makes sense!

[700NitroXpress]

You treat it the same way you would with regular docking procedure. Only this is heading out of the Kerbin SOI. So when it gets close to Kerbin, you need to burn towards it as it passes you. This will make you head out of the SOI as well, but it's ok. Click on your velocity on the nav ball gadget until it shows the target velocity. Then you just have to get the velocity to point towards your target. You'll catch up to it eventually. When you do, latch onto it, aiming at the center of mass as best you can. Then switch you velocity over to orbital. You now need to burn retrograde if you're still in the SOI, otherwise you'll have to plot an intercept back with Kerbin. Then you would use aerobraking the way you normally would and all that.

Or you could try Plan B, which involves setting a direct impact course with the thing, but I don't recommend that unless you have a lot of fuel and a strong engine. Since you'll have to stop and match it's speed before you hit.

Edited April 3, 2014 by 700NitroXpress

[Superfluous J]

What I do, you can't because you waited until it was in Kerbin's SOI.

What I do is get my apoapsis near where the asteroid enters Kerbin's SOI with a time as close as possible to the asteroid's time of entering SOI. When you're way out there, maneuvers are pretty cheap and you can, at apoapsis, just match velocity with the asteroid (the same way you rendezvous to dock with a space station) and then approach (again, the same as with a space station).

I don't know what you can do now. Meet it at periapsis? As was said, you'll have to do all the pushing yourself without aid of the atmosphere.

[WhiteWeasel]

Hey I got it! But another question is how do I intercept an asteroid outside kerbins' SOI?

[WhiteWeasel]

Yeah how do I rendezvous with this?

[DonLorenzo]

Rendez-vousing with an asteroid thats on an impact or low PE hyperbolic trajectory can be approximated by a 'catching a falling ball' analogy. You're not really matching two ellipses in space and time, but timing a certain point of one ellipse (your orbit) to coincide with a point on a more or less straight line. IMO this is easier than an orbital rendez-vous, in concept at any rate. What I do is make sure the planes are aligned properly and then adjust my AP to be as close as possible to the trajectory of the infalling asteroid. Then I tweak the height (and thus also the timing) of the AP so that an encounter or close approach happens. If you're in time you'll meet the asteroid rather high where maneuvers are still cheap enough for modest-sized-vessels.

I hope that made some sense!

[WhiteWeasel]

Is there a tutorial that I can look at?

[Claw]

Is there a tutorial that I can look at?

If you haven't, give the in-game scenario a try. It has a rendezvous mostly set up that you finish off. Might give you an idea how to start.

Also, there's a second tutorial where the claw is close to the asteroid, so you can practice clamping on.

[MisterFister]

Is there a tutorial that I can look at?

Scott Manley is widely regarded as one of, if not the single, best KSP pilot on YouTube. To be fair, the first of those two links is Part 1, which doesn't address your underlying question of flying and maneuvering, but he does showcase some of the new parts in the VAB and demonstrates the new ion engine stats. Worth a look, but skippable if you're jonesing too hard for the answer to your question.

Edited April 5, 2014 by MisterFister

[WhiteWeasel]

Yeah I figured it out myself.