New Way to Reach Mars Cheaply

Getting spacecraft to Mars can be a hassle – and very costly - not to mention actions the spacecraft would have to perform to swing into orbit that requires hundreds of extra pounds of fuel; and could find up as a potential failure. The Hohmnn transfer brute force approach of attaining orbit has worked well historically. But in times of shrinking science funding, there is new research that lays out a smoother, safer way to achieve Martian orbit. It’s called ballistic capture - also called a low-energy transfer. "It's an eye-opener," says James Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division. While at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory 25 years ago, Edward Belbruno, now a visiting associated researcher at Princeton University, laid out the Hohmann fuel-and-cost-shaving orbital insertion method for probes to the Moon. But pulling off a similar maneuver for Mars seemed impossible because of the planet’s velocity. "I gave up on it," Belbruno says. However, while recently consulting for Boeing, one of four major contractors for NASA's Space Launch System, Belbruno and colleagues stumbled on an idea that would let the spacecraft be ballistically captured. Boeing, intrigued by the approach funded the study in which the authors crunched numbers and developed models for the capture. ATK Space Systems is among the four partners with NASA. (Source: Scientific American, 12/22/14) Central Mississippi Note: ATK’s aerospace and defense businesses operate in 21 states, including a machining and testing equipment site at ATK’s Aerospace Structures division in Iuka, Miss.