Mission To Eris

[Mr Shifty]

I was browsing through NASA's Eyes on the Solar System application, watching New Horizon's fly-by of Pluto, which will occur almost exactly one year from now. (Closest approach 12,640 km -- well within Charon's orbit -- at a relative velocity of 13.8 km/s on July 14, 2015.) It got me wondering what it would take to design an Eris fly-by mission. It's currently near aphelion and somewhat below the plane of the ecliptic. It's hard to find information, but I don't think it'll cross the ecliptic until the mid 2100's. To get there sooner, I wondered if a Jupiter flyby could throw a spacecraft down toward Eris; Jupiter should be in position at around 2023. If we could accelerate a spacecraft to speeds similar to New Horizons (23.3 km/s sun-relative leaving Jupiter) it might be possible to get to Eris from there in 23 years, flying by in 2046 or so. It would be interesting to try to figure out what a mission like that would take.

[Scotius]

Who knows - maybe by 2040 we will have VASIMR engines powerful enough to fly such mission in less time?

[Mr Shifty]

Some internet searching reveals that the Orbiter community has already stepped up to this plate. Here's a mission profile that leaves Earth in 2015 and flies by Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune before arriving at Eris in 2049:

http://orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?p=17265&postcount=16

Piper designed an Orbiter spacecraft and successfully flew the mission profile, dropping probes into the planetary atmosphere's at each stop, then released a full spacecraft + mission scenario add-on that may or may not work with Orbiter 2010.

[Mr Shifty]

And this trajectory using Arrowstar's Trajectory Optimization Tool for Orbiter is similar (Eris's designation is 2136199 in JPL's Horizon ephemeris data.) It leaves a year later and arrives a few months later and only requires a burn of 6.6 km/s from a circular Earth parking orbit at 130km.