Adam Hibberd
Have you noticed, 3I/ATLAS is well and truly on its way out of the Solar System? It has afterall passed through its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) and is well on its way to a close encounter with Jupiter in mid-March – given this, it would seem to be the ideal moment to contemplate a mission to catch it up.
Many readers will immediately object at this point since hasn’t it conclusively been shown by such papers as this one, that a spacecraft mission from Earth is completely infeasible?
That may be the case but the reader will have overlooked a significant and important detail if they believe so. Most of these previous papers have assumed direct transfer to the target in question – 3I/ATLAS – and have not addressed (to any depth at least) the possibility of indirect missions.
This is where I come in with my extremely powerful software development ‘Optimum Interplanetary Trajectory Software‘ (OITS), a tool I designed to study precisely the indirect possibility – i.e. gravitational assists (or sling-shots) and/or ‘Oberth Manoeuvres’ along the way to the target – and it can handle the direct case also. What amazing software, hey?
You may well have heard of the gravity assist (GA) but what on Earth is an ‘Oberth Manoeuvre’?
This is where a spacecraft under the gravitational influence of a massive body (in this case the Sun) waits to achieve the closest approach (periapsis, or perihelion for the Sun) and then applies thrust at this most propitious point to achieve a high heliocentric speed, in this case resulting in it being shot out of the Solar System, and towards the interstellar object which will have travelled a huge distance by this time.
My research paper with Marshall Eubanks has come out on arXiv here, or alternatively feel free to visit my ResearchGate profile here.
To summarise the results, there is a way to achieve intercept using a ‘Solar Oberth’ but launch would have to be in the year 2035 to allow optimal alignment between Earth/Jupiter and 3I/ATLAS, and the flight duration would be 50 years, but this could be reduced marginally.
I provide an animation created by OITS of just such a trajectory.