The Mathematics of a Trip to Mars?

Posted by Cliff on Monday August 15, 2005 @11:02AM from the shouldn't-it-be-more-complex-than-this dept.

hakonhaugnes wonders: "Since trips to Mars seems commonplace (NASA has sent one every 26 months), I thought it made sense to try to understand how the interplanetary trajectory is calculated. NASA's page is deploringly void of intricate details. I found this excellent page, but it still left me feeling that I was missing something. Surely the calculus must go beyond two bodies (mars/earth)? (It seems there are commercial MATLAB scripts available but at $150 it went beyond the defensible to satisfy my curiosity). Are there any curious Slashdot readers with the usual great insight into how to calculate a trip to Mars?"

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PC bug by Anonymous Coward · 2005-08-15 11:35 · Score: -1, Redundant

"and the person my judging team ranked the highest had set himself precisely this problem"

Is Canada being bit by the PC bug too ? Since you know exactly who ranked the highest, we know if it's a him or her, a boy, a student or just some guy, which would help us refer to "him" in normalspeak rather than the vacuous ambivalent mode.