🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct30.163302.15547@rcvie.co.at> Ian Taylor writes:
>While I'm here, anyone know if a gravity assist trajectory can be used to 
>*reduce* speed?  

NASA had a proposal to launch a solar probe (Starprobe) at Jupiter which
would have put it into an orbit of (if memory serves) 0.25AU perihelion and
a period of 4.5 years.  Whether that counts as a *slowdown* though...

	...but officer, I was only doing 80km a second...
					 ^^
Then there's Ulysses, whose speed was unchanged, merely(!) redirected by
90 degrees.

You can get to Mercury cheaper by slowing via Venus, I think, then there
was a scare a few (seems a million) years ago about a dastardly Russian
plan to send a satkiller into *retrograde* Clarke orbit via the Moon.

There's no end to the fun you can have playing interplanetary snooker; I
think the fundamental limit for any single encounter (confirmation, please?)
is the vector sum of spacecraft and accelerating body beforehand.

-- 
 ',' ' ',','  |                                                  |  ',' ' ',','
   ', ,','    |       Del Cotter       mt90dac@brunel.ac.uk      |    ', ,','  
     ','      |                                                  |      ','