Space Travels

This morning, Natasha refered me to Cainer's Astrology Website and its "About a friend" feature. It is quite true for some of my friends! I suggest you try yours!

Anne: put your name in! ;)

This guy talks about a theory which I hadnt heard of: gravitational corridors. In short, the CNN article has the story. I looked up the scientist's website, and here goes: Martin Lo website.

It's funny that in the three-body problem (that I looked into a long time ago when I did Astrophyics & Runge-Kutta... old memories), there are some areas of balanced attraction between the planets. Here is what Cainer said to summarise it (it's pretty darn well vulgarised):

A fascinating article in the latest edition of the New Scientist describes 'gravitational corridors' between all the major bodies in our solar system. These work rather like underground tube lines. They form a network of shifting, invisible tunnels that could allow space ships to travel using very little energy. Jupiter, apparently, is a 'central station' in this system.

This knowledge is used by Lo to compute optimal flight paths for space missions to a low-fuel cost! Spatial bodies motion result in the shifting of the corridors position... Really interesting!