Fly Me to the Moon (ebook)

Argumento de Fly Me to the Moon (ebook)

When a leaf falls on a windy day, it drifts and tumbles, tossed every which way on the breeze. This is chaos in action. In Fly Me to the Moon, Edward Belbruno shows how to harness the same principle for low-fuel space travel--or, as he puts it, "surfing the gravitational field."

Belbruno devised one of the most exciting concepts now being used in space flight, that of swinging through the cosmos on the subtle fluctuations of the planets' gravitational pulls. His idea was met with skepticism until 1991, when he used it to get a stray Japanese satellite back on course to the Moon. The successful rescue represented the first application of chaos to space travel and ushered in an emerging new field.

Part memoir, part scientific adventure story, Fly Me to the Moon gives a gripping insider's account of that mission and of Belbruno's personal struggles with the science establishment. Along the way, Belbruno introduces readers to recent breathtaking advances in American space exploration. He discusses ways to capture and redirect asteroids; presents new research on the origin of the Moon; weighs in on discoveries like 2003 UB313 (now named Eris), a dwarf planet detected in the far outer reaches of our solar system--and much more.

Grounded in Belbruno's own rigorous theoretical research but written for a general audience, Fly Me to the Moon is for anybody who has ever felt moved by the spirit of discovery.

"Almost fifty years after the beginning of space flight, Belbruno's work offers a realistic beginning for minimum--fuel and maximum--payload trajectories for interplanetary operations. It is a mark of sophistication in the evolution of space travel that simplified solutions to the vexing many-body problem are found to have practical applications. Belbruno's three-body solution for low-thrust minimum-fuel trajectories serves well not only the future of space flight but helps astronomy in understanding the sometimes erratic motions of celestial bodies."--Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut

"Fly Me to the Moon is a fast, easy read that explains in simple nonscientific terms very complex matters of celestial mechanics, and it is delightful reading for students and professionals to update or learn very important new background materials. It is also a must-read for the lawyer-scientist."--Ambassador Edward R. Finch, Jr.

"This is an excellent book. The author succeeds in writing an exciting story about his research on low-fuel space travel, a subject that is not widely known but that will interest many readers. Moreover, the mathematical aspects of chaos in the context of space missions is well treated at the level of the nonexpert."--Florin Diacu, University of Victoria

"This is a good story. It is rare to see a nonpedantic book on celestial mechanics that gives some backroom stories about trajectory geeks. Belbruno ties very abstract concepts to real problems and situations."--Wendell W. Mendell, NASA Johnson Space Center, Astromaterials Research & Exploration Science Directorate

"This is an excellent book. It is an inside look at the important new field of chaotic trajectories by one of the masters and originators of the field. As we continue into space, I think we will be hearing more and more about these clever trajectories. Ed Belbruno has covered in a beautiful and interesting way the important applications of chaos to astrophysics and spacecraft trajectories. He also tells a very interesting personal story of his battles to get these trajectories used, and how he was able to save the Hiten spacecraft and get it to the moon. This is a great story, and he tells it very well."--Richard Gott, Princeton University

"The author's newly discovered interplanetary highways offer a romantic reflection of the pre-rocket, pre-airplane era, where balloons would transport us, with hardly any energy of our own, from one unexplored vista to another."--From the foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and Director of the Hayden Planetarium, American Museum of Natural History, author of Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

"Fly Me to the Moon provides a fast, very readable account of new developments in chaotic celestial mechanics, especially low-fuel space travel, at a level appropriate for a general audience. By the end, nonmathematicians will have gained some intuition about one of the hallmarks of chaos, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and how chaos can be harnessed to good purpose. All readers will walk away thinking differently about the cosmos. Far from being a clockwork, it will seem more dynamic, more turbulent, and full of diverse possibilities."--Shane Ross, Notices of the American Mathematical Society

"A small group of scientists has worked on new orbits that take into account the inherently chaotic motion of object in a multibody system. . . . One of the innovators in what is known as 'capture dynamics', Ed Belbruno, provides a basic and eminently readable introduction to the topic in Fly Me to the Moon."--Jeff Foust, The Space Review

"This book does for mathematics what The Double Helix did for biochemistry, without the gossip and diatribe that made The Double Helix so controversial...Overall, this book is a superb introduction to the life of a real mathematician, and a gentle introduction to some very complex mathematics."--Jeff Suzuki, MAA Review0Foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Chapter 1 A Moment of Discovery 1
Chapter 2 An Uncertain Start 5
Chapter 3 Conventional Way to the Moon 9
A Fuel Hog 14
Chapter 4 A Question 17
Chapter 5 Chaos and Surfing the Gravitational Field 29
What Is Chaos? 31
Chapter 6 Using Art to Find Chaotic Regions 37
An Oil Painting Unveiling Dynamical
Processes 37
Chapter 7 WSB--A Chaotic No-Man's-Land 41
Chapter 8 Getting to the WSB--Low Energy Transfers 49
Chapter 9 Rescue of a Lunar Mission 55
Skepticism, Politics, and a Bittersweet Success 63
Chapter 10 Significance of Hiten 69
Chapter 11 Salvage of HGS-1, and a Christmas Present 77
Chapter 12 Other Space Missions and Low Energy Transfers 83
LGAS Reincarnated: SMART 1 83
Europa Orbiter and Prometheus 85
A Lunar Transportation System 91
Chapter 13 Hopping Comets and Earth Collision 95
Potential Earth Collision 108
Lexell 109
Jupiter-Hopping Earth-Crossing Comets Present a Danger 111
Kuiper Belt Objects and Neptune Hopping 113
Ballistic Escape from the Earth-Moon System, and Asteroid Capture 115
Chapter 14 The Creation of the Moon by Another World 119
Chapter 15 Beyond the Moon and to the Stars 129
Pluto to Alpha Centauri 129
Comets Moving between the Sun and Alpha Centauri 133
Chapter 16 A Paradigm Shift and the Future 137
Bibliography 141
Index 147