[This is the fourth in a series of articles giving the background to Ed Belbruno's work on the Interplanetary Transport Network. The earlier articles were Halfway to anywhere, Lagrange points (1), and Three is a crowd. This article looks at the stability of the Lagrange points.] What does it mean to ask if something is [...]
[This is the third in a series of articles giving the background to Ed Belbruno's work on the Interplanetary Transport Network. The first earlier articles were Halfway to anywhere, and Lagrange points (1). This article derives the final two Lagrange points, L4 and L5.] One of the reasons Stephen Hawkins and others are so silly [...]
The sun’s mass M is about 333,000 times the earth’s mass m, so at the same distance an object is pulled 333,000 times harder by the sun. [For convenience, we will often use k = M/m]. Sitting on the surface of the earth, this is completely outweighed by the fact that the centre of the [...]
[Ed Belbruno promoting his second - more popular book "Fly Me to the Moon" (a short - pp176 - autobiographical account of his ideas). His more technical book was Capture Dynamics and Chaotic Motions in Celestial Mechanics, pp224, 2004] I am hoping to write a few articles on orbital mechanics, leading up to the idea [...]
Asteroid 2005 YU55 is due to pass by the earth at about 85% of the distance to the moon at 7:45pm tonight. This is a radar image obtained yesterday by NASA when it was still about 3.6 “lunar distances” away. The asteroid is about 1300ft in diameter. Put another way, it should miss by about [...]
