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The problem with Oregon, and most of the rest of the US is the finite number of North-South roads. How do you get into the path of totality? Highway 5 or Highway 97. These highways are 2 lanes in each direction, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to try to use them, and they all have...

I'm going to Oregon. It's supposed to be a mob scene. Madres motels want $1000/night with a 3 night minimum. So I'm probably just going to arrive 2 days early and do some car camping in the desert. If you watch the partial phases leading up to totality, your eyes might not be dark-adapted...

Yes, it's real. Only 90 minutes till impact. It hits at 02:48 on October 7 UT. If you run the above scenerio file, use the arrow buttons to center Earth as it gets close.

The delta glider follows Asteroid 2008 TC3 on its collision course with Sudan in 2 hours. BEGIN_DESC Orbiter saved state at T = 226 END_DESC BEGIN_ENVIRONMENT System Sol Date MJD 54745.0026170139 END_ENVIRONMENT BEGIN_FOCUS Ship GL-01 END_FOCUS BEGIN_CAMERA TARGET GL-01 MODE Extern POS 36.47...

Keep in mind that lots of times final correction burns are canceled because the previous ones were right on the money.

Use this Calculator to find the L points: http://orbitsimulator.com/formulas/LagrangePointFinder.html

You are right. Brian put together a nice package available here: http://library.avsim.net/search.php?SearchTerm=phoenix+mars&CatID=root

I'm not sure it can be done analytically. In that paper it states "We are unable to find closed-form solutions to equation 10 for general values of alpha, so instead we seek approximate solutions valid in the limit alpha << 1." When I plug numbers in their formula, L1 is off by nearly 1...

Here's a calculator I made to find the exact spot. It does it numerically, starting with the Hill Sphere as an estimate, then zeroing in on L1 by computing the orbital period of an object being tugged one way by the Sun and the other way by the Earth. When it finds a distance where the period is...

That's where I'm trying to get you to. L1 is inbetween the Earth and Sun, about 1497000 km from Earth, in the direction opposite L2. The Sun and Earth don't cancel each other there. That point is much closer to Earth. L1 is the point where Earth's pull decreases the Sun's gravity vector to the...

Here's a scenerio file that starts the day before Phoenix lands on Mars. The Delta Glider is placed on Phoenix's trajectory. If you run it through, the Delta Glider passes through Mars' atmosphere near its North Pole, and then escapes. See if you can pilot it to a landing. Trajectory data is...

Can you just burn when you're lined up with L2, until your apogee is the distance of L1?

I just tried 2 golf balls (0.046 kg each) orbiting each other in Earth orbit with an SMA of 100,000 km. Their orbits are chaotic due to Earth's presence, but they complete a few orbits. Beyond 100,000 km, they're probably pretty stable. The period of their orbit around each other is about 8...

As long as you are above the atmosphere, you can circularize your orbit with: towards (aim straight at the ground), away (180 degrees from towards), prograde or retrograde burns: If you are at apoapsis, burn prograde until your eccentricity is 0. If you are at periapsis, burn retrograde until...

Here's a few more that I wrote. They're not directly Orbiter-related. They're javascript astronomy calculators: http://orbitsimulator.com/formulas

A Few Orbiter Utilities Here's some links to various Orbiter utilities I made over the years. I think I had all these posted on M6 in various places. But since that forum seems to be lost, I'll put them here too. At least they're all in one place now...

Someone give me the joystick, I'll only charge $2 million :) I'm glad they've changed their minds. That would be a waste to abandon a perfectly good rover. It might be time to take on some riskier adventures.