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It's astonishing to me that you can orbit a point in space between two planetary bodies. There's nothing on Earth that would give you that intuitive understandi
by asteli 8y ago
It's astonishing to me that you can orbit a point in space between two planetary bodies. There's nothing on Earth that would give you that intuitive understanding.
I'm curious if over the next hundreds of years if the Lagrange points will become contentious regions of space, perhaps the subject of territorial disputes. It's perhaps cynical to project humanity's pettiness into the future but if the L* points are as valuable for lunar access as the article says, it's not unthinkable.
- mLuby 8y agoI'm picturing one of the swimming pools shaped like Ultima-Thule where a roller skater can circle around a highpoint in the middle. The high point itself is unstable (like L1 L2 L3) but can be orbited with minor corrections.
- penagwin 8y agoThis fascinates me. On a side note, can somebody much smarted then me tell me if it's possible to "sling shot" (Gravity assist?) Off a Lagrange point?
- abecedarius 8y agoNot a sling shot in terms of gaining energy, but there's an interesting trick I don't really understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo...
- sandworm101 8y agoYes, if coming from outside the 2-body system. But you aren't really getting an assist from the L point. You are being accelerated by the pair of bodies that create the point. Such an assist is very very slight, not worth the effort in comparison to using either of the bodies directly. Unless you are an interstellar traveler looking for an assist from a pair of binary stars that you really do not want to get too close to. That is scifi territory atm.
- jamesough 8y agoHere's an intuitive explanation for L1: Imagine you have two planetary bodies fixed in space. A free mass is attracted to both, but it's possible to find an unstable equilibrium somewhere between them. Put the mass here, and it'll stay still-- but it's like balancing a ball on the top of a sphere; it'll roll off towards one of the two planets unless you stabilize it. Now imagine displacing the mass from the equilibrium, but in a direction perpendicular to the line between the planets-- it'll swing back and forth like one of those slingshot rides. There are two dimensions perpendicular to the line between the planets, so two dimensions with stable oscillations, therefore you can get circular orbits.
- crgwbr 8y agoI guess theoretically a Lagrange point is a single point in space, but in practice, how large are they? Assuming a station with the mass of the ISS, how far from the ideal Lagrange point can you be while still maintaining a reasonably stable orbit?