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Last April, the Genesis spacecraft began its journey home. It had been parked out in space collecting solar particles for 2 years. Yet even though its job was done, Genesis didn't head straight home. Instead, it took a 3-million-mile detour, swinging past Earth to do a loop de loop around a distant point before flying back to Earth.

This circuitous route was no accident. The spacecraft had hopped aboard the interplanetary superhighway, a network of tubes crisscrossing through the solar system. By jumping from one tube to another at the solar system's version of highway interchanges, a spacecraft can travel vast distances using practically no fuel.

A celestial superhighway sounds like the output of a science fiction writer's overheated brain. Yet it's reality, grounded in the competing gravitational tugs of the sun, Earth, and other solar system bodies. By studying the mathematics underlying subtle gravitational interactions, researchers are starting to create an atlas of this superhighway. Engineers are designing trajectories to send spacecraft coasting along these routes to make voyages that were previously unimaginable.

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Posts: 2756 | Registered: Jul 2002  |  IP: Logged | 

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Isn't there a bypass of that scheduled to go through the earth?

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Posts: 2445 | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged |