The paper itself provides much more insight into the actual physics behind this [1]. The article doesn't really do the paper justice in my mind, based on my kno

The paper itself provides much more insight into the actual physics behind this [1]. The article doesn't really do the paper justice in my mind, based on my knowledge of the subject matter (although I appreciate the intent of providing an accessible means to introduce the topic). I wrote my MSc thesis on weak capture trajectories and the concept of the Weak Stability Boundary [2] that was introduced by Ed Belbruno. It's a fantastic aspect of the gravitational 3-body problem and has been probed from a number of different perspectives over the last two decades, including tying in the phenomenon of weak/ballistic capture into our understanding of the structure of invariant manifolds and the periodic orbits about the Lagrange libration points. Disclaimer: Francesco is my boss but I haven't spoken to him yet about the paper. [1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.8856v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.8856v1.pdf [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-energy_transfer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-energy_transfer