NASA offers podtseplyat spaceships to comets to enter into deep space

At NASA over the past few months, a large number of great ideas. This and submarines on Titan, and drones on Mars, and the device is melted ice on Europe. Now there is another idea - использовать comet to move spacecraft , hooked to such an object, over long distances.

So far it is only an idea, but Masahiro It (Masahiro Ono) from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, believes that this method of movement can be very effective. The realization of the idea according It should not be too challenging. But the "comet hitchhiking" would allow the spacecraft and devices to travel throughout the solar system at low cost resources and high speed.

The author compares the idea of ​​a way to get around with fishing, where fisherman catches a very big fish. That starts to run away from the boat, and the boat pulls behind him, with ever increasing speed. Such a scheme is proposed Masahiro It to move on comets: the ship flies to such an object, its harpoon (rope here is particularly strong nanofiber), and flies with the comet at a point in space. Of course, not every comet for "hitchhiking", but here you need to work to refine the trajectory of comets (and the trajectories of a large number already known), in order to have a good idea where you can fly using a similar object.



It calculated the possible paths of travel to different objects of the solar system, and that's what he got: Pluto can be reached in just 5 years 5 to Jaume just 9 years old. This is almost two times faster than in the case of «New Horizons», a probe launched to Pluto in 2006.

So far, no one has expressed interest in financing such an original project, and it is unclear whether such a concept generally used as a real offer. But rational here really is, and perhaps soon the project will run for several specialists (even in his spare time), rather than one.

When calculating the exact ship, traveling in such an original way, do not need a large amount of fuel. And the astronauts if the ship will be with the team will be able to study a comet in the "free" time, which they will have a huge amount. With the help of some technologies may even be able to command a ship to get energy from the "fix" the ship and the comet.



Naturally, we need a very accurate calculation - in fact closer to the comet - a difficult task, and if the relationship between the spacecraft and the comet is violated, the ship with the team (or spacecraft) is lost, and it will have virtually no chance to return to Earth.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/244988/