Astronomers Just Found Cosmic 'Superhighways' For Fast Travel Through The Solar System

The space between the two spinning body’s gravities where the two currents are so strong they do not meet....the slip screen if you will....riding the scree....

Time to send up a rocket full of "nano" satellites to start testing these highways.

originally posted by: 38181
a reply to: beyondknowledge
They did, it’s called the slingshot method.

Sort of, but it doesn't involve just zooming in a close orbit around a planet. It's a lot more complex than that. The "slingshot" (orbital transfer) occurs out in the middle of space. No planet to zoom around.



Here's a simplified explanation. (Kidding)
digitalcommons.calpoly.edu...

a reply to: jjkenobi

Time to send up a rocket full of "nano" satellites to start testing these highways.

It's been done.

The trajectory that Genesis used can be seen in Figure 1.1, where the red trajectory is the halo orbit used to collect samples and the blue is the transfer back to Earth

digitalcommons.calpoly.edu...


Space skatepark.

a reply to: Phage

The existence of gravitational "manifolds" has been known for quite a while.

A slight clarification may be in order here. A manifold is a mathematical concept not a physical object. A dirty but usable definition of a manifold is 'a space with a shape that can be locally defined by Euclidean geometry'. A manifold can have any number of dimensions.

Treating 3D (and above) spaces locally as Euclidean spaces makes it much easier to solve simultaneous equations containing interdependent variables, such as appear in the three-body problem. Thus the usefulness of the concept of manifolds in orbital mechanics.

Wormholes in space they ain't.

originally posted by: MonkeyFishFrog
Not gonna lie but this is a killer discovery. It's the equivalent of the universe having currents

Excuse me while I rip on my bong and think about the possibilities of gravitational superhighways

This is just a development of stuff that has been known for decades and used to plan the trajectories of missions including the return of Apollo 13. These scientists have created the most detailed map so far.

Which is definitely awesome.

If I were thirty years younger, I'd do exactly the same.

This sounds like the method of space travel used in Fritz Leiber's short story, "They Never Come Back" (published in the August 1941 issue of Future Fiction magazine).

"[Interplanetary ships] clung to space warps - invisible lines along which the gravitational pull between the various planets of the solar system was concentrated. The discovery of the existence of these warps toward the end of the twentieth century - and the possibility of intensifying them by special projectors - had revolutionized the science of physics and made space travel possible."



a reply to: dug88