Interplanetary Superhighway

rotenberry writes "The current issue of Caltech's Engineering and Science magizine contains the article "Next Exit 0.5 Million Kilometers - A Caltech/JPL collaboration explores the 'Interplanetary Superhighway.'" which describes "...the Interplanetary Superhighway - 'a vast network of winding tunnels in space' that connects the sun, the planets, their moons, and a host of other destinations as well. But unlike the wormholes beloved of science-fiction writers, these things are real. In fact, they are already being used." However, it takes a very long time to get there."

Comments

huh?

[adamruck]

dont the planets move around the sun at different rates? So how would it be possible to make a fixed structure to "drive" to a planet?

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'network of tunnels' analogy is actually quite fitting. There are manifold surfaces in space which, once you are on them, you automatically fall to a destination lagrange point. That is where that analogy comes from.

(Of course, the manifolds do not just have coordinates in space but have required velocities at those coordinates. But once you are "on" the manifold in the sense of being in the right place with the right velocity, then it works exactly like a tunnel connecting you to somewhere else because you simply "fall" there without having to do anything else.)

Any distributed computing people listening?

[asparagus]

Here is a project I would love to support.

Massive amounts of numbers to be crunched, tons of routes to be discovered, and all by lowly computers with nothing better to do.

Proving that some ungodly number of ProcHours can figure out a RC-72 bit key is meaningless to me.

This is the sort of science humanity is interested in. Onward to Mars!

-Brett

Re:Seven Rules For Spotting Bogus Science

[vortmax(OU)]

Bogus science? How about this?

From the article:
Ideally, a spacecraft at L4 or L5 will remain there indefinitely because when it falls off the cusp, the Coriolis effect--which makes it hard for you to walk on a moving merry-go-round--will swirl it into a long-lived orbit around that point.

IIRC from physics classes, is the force making it hard to walk on a moving merry-go-round not the centripetal force?? I thought Coriolis was only a pseudo-force, not a real one.

Re:Seven Rules For Spotting Bogus Science

[grumpygrodyguy]

I wonder if this applies to the seven rules for spotting bogus science?

Believe it or not, basic celestial mechanics still has several unsolved problems.

For instance noone knows exactly how to model the formation of ring structures like the Kuiper Belt(a ring of asteroids orbiting the sun), or Saturn's rings.

If you don't believe me check out this link.

Re:Wait a minute... how long?

[TheRealBlueEAGLE]

This might seem like a joke, but in the very end it is a point. It's like the atmosphere or the oceans. Since there's a lot of it it doesn't matter if we dumt this and that into it.

Hopefully we'll find other ways to explore the space before we slow down so much that we crash into the sun. :)

Hmm.. who wants to start a project on sourceforge?

[bigattichouse]

All the math makes me brain spin, but it would be seriously cool to have a linux-based "navigator".. give it the current date and your position and find the nearest routes to Jupiter.

You know I wonder if this idea opens the thoughts for an interplantary positioning system (IPS)... in order to know where you get off, you'd have to know where you are.

Re:yes, it takes a long time.

[Tony-A]

Ok, I'll bite. Yes, the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line. That's because a straight line is *THE* path between the two points with the shortest distance. (You can have some fun with equivalence classes if there's more than of of 'em;) A straight line on a 3-d sphere goes through the sphere, not on the surface. A straight line on a 2-d surface of a sphere will not look straight when projected onto a flat map. A straight line on a Mercator projection is not the shortest distance on the represented 2d-surface, but does have the advantage that you can pick a heading, stay on it, and get there eventually.

Re:for those who didn't understand the article ...

[chaotician137]

Thanks Heisenburg! It's good to know some people appreciate our work. It's bloody hard to explain to NASA managers, much less the general public. This article is a sort of first attempt.

Although I guess I am in some sense a "rocket scientist," I think the truly cool aspect of the work is the light that it sheds on the mechanisms of "interplanetary cross-fertilization." This understanding contributes to fields such as astrobiology, for example, where comet impact rates are key for determining the delivery of water to the Earth and impact ejecta exchange rates are important for investigating the transportation of microbes between Mars and Earth.

By the way, the fastest that a piece of impact ejecta has been able to get between Earth and Mars in any simulation is 10,000 years. This would be a piece of debris which, due to nonlinear effects, repeately encountered Mars and Earth with just the right geometry that it made the trip in the fastest time. The average transit time for bits of debries is a few million years.