Funmurphys: the Blog

Celestial Gravity Surfing

Science News has a really neat article about the real minimum energy transfer between planets. No, not the Hohmann transfer orbits I learned about in Orbital Mechanics class, but a solution to the three body problem. It uses gravity to do most of the work, and so while it takes a lot longer to get somewhere, it's eyepoppingly low energy - one mission only took 4% of total mass.