Adam Hibberd
This is how I'd explain my paper to a mate in a pub:
"The Solar System is comprised of lots of different objects (like planets, asteroids and comets) which go around the central Sun, in huge ellipses. You may say the Earth’s path is circular, that’s true, but in fact all circles are just special sorts of ellipses.
So if you observe a new object and its path (or ‘orbit’) is elliptical, then you know it belongs to OUR Solar System, right?
However when astronomers looked at the path of one particular object, later given the name 3I/ATLAS, it turned out NOT to be elliptically shaped, but instead it was hyperbolic. A hyperbola is just a particular sort of shape which starts off at a humongous distance from the Sun, and so we know this object came from somewhere OUTSIDE our Solar System. In fact it belongs to some other Solar System – with a different central star - in the massive Galaxy, the Milky Way, which our Solar System is a part of. Thus we call 3I/ATLAS an ‘interstellar object’.
Now by sending a spacecraft to intercept 3I/ATLAS, we can discover all sorts of things about the System to which it belongs – and by so-doing it saves us the very difficult task of having to travel light years and light years to explore the nearest stars – this object is here already, IT has done all the travelling!
There is a problem though. 3I/ATLAS is now heading out of our Solar System at a huge speed – more than 60 km/s, so any probe we send will have to go even faster than this to catch it up.
The problem was solved using some software I developed. (I called this software ‘Optimum Interplanetary Trajectory Software’ – OITS.) It turns out there IS a way of generating a speed greater than 60 km/s. The probe must first launch in 2035, travel to Jupiter where it can slow down – since Jupiter’s incredible mass can do this – and fall in towards the Sun.
Because the Sun has a very strong attractive force due to its huge gravitational field – it is after all the most massive thing in our Solar System - the probe accelerates and accelerates, faster and faster as it approaches the Sun. By the time it reaches perihelion, so in other words when it is at the closest point to the Sun, it is travelling at 346 km/s. That speed is way faster than any spacecraft ever made, 80% faster even than the fastest of all time, Parker Solar Probe which reached 191 km/s.
The ‘Oberth Effect’ says that the faster you are moving in a gravitational field – like the Sun’s – the greater the increase in energy due to any thrust your rocket engines may generate. Thus, reaching low perihelion with a high speed, is ideal for exploiting the most from the Oberth Effect, as it is most effective use of the onboard propellant.
So my software discovered that if this rocket thrust can apply a change in velocity of only 8 km/s or so, the spacecraft can get to the target 3I/ATLAS after an overall flight time of 35-50 years.
That may seem long, but clearly far quicker than going to the nearest stars. Also notice the Voyager 1 and 2 probes were launched in 1977, 49 years ago, and they are still sending useful data back to Earth up to this very day."