Eteroclinic trajectories and the Interplanetary Transport Network

[Flightoffancy]

I know there have been several discussions involving Lagrange points here.

Has anyone even touched on eteroclinic trajectories or the Interplanetary Transport Network?

Would this even be possible in Orbiter or does the inaccuracy of time compression make this prohibitive?

I read up on it a little bit this afternoon and now my head hurts. (Maybe a math background would have helped me)

 

[cjp]

I know you already know about [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3644"]Lagrange MFD[/ame].

AFAIK, MartinS likes to make Orbiter's orbital calculations as accurate as possible, as far as an interactive simulation allows. I wouldn't know why Orbiter wouldn't be accurate enough for such trajectories.

I guess you'll need to make course corrections to reach your destination, but you also need to do that with conventional trajectories in Orbiter, and it isn't even unrealistic, because real-life spacecrafts also need to make course corrections, due to limited course prediction accuracy, navigation uncertainties & so on.

What you need is the right navigation and trajectory prediction instrument. AFAIK that is not yet available. Most MFDs that do trajectory prediction (like TransX) have limited accuracy, and their result is different from what the Orbiter simulation gives you. Maybe it would be nice to have a universal trajectory prediction routine, that can be used by every MFD in the future.

Where have you been reading about "eteroclinic" trajectories?

 

[Flightoffancy]

Sorry, I dropped the "H" while copying and pasting and forgot to pick it back up again. Its a term I only came across today. I was looking further into Lagrange points and went on a Wikipedia tangent.

Yes, I am aware of the MFD and have used it a little bit. Its definitely helpful since there is currently no other means by which to target or reference the Lagrange points in space. Great work and I hope you can develop it further.

I have every faith that the Orbiter sim itself would be up to the task of exploiting halo orbits, heteroclinic tranfers and such. My only worry there would be that the slight variations that arise from using time compression vs what you get in realtime would hinder pilot operations that are supposedly very dependent on precise timing. I understand that's why Martin was splitting off the core sim from the graphics engine to improve precision and it not be dependant on frame rates. Maybe using fixed the time steps option would be helpful.

Of course any long distance maneuver requires some course correction. The nth degree builds up over very long distances and it becomes harder to predict accurately.

And I agree, the greatest challenge would in navigation. Thats what I was pondering if anyone had been thinking in the direction addons that make use of these low energy means of transport. (mostly for use with craft as humans are too impatient to travel this way. LOX tanks are expensive too)
I know what a halo orbit is, but haven't the slightest idea how to get into one much less transfer to another.