Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Calculate Initial Velocity For Orbital (Gravity) Slingshot


I am trying to find the initial velocity to slingshot a planet around the sun and through a gap.


enter image description here


The green ball is the planet, and the yellow ball is the sun. In this trial I need to get the planet to go around the sun and through the gap at 278Gm. I have tried different approaches, but nothing seems to be even remotely correct. Anything under 20k m/s will land you in the sun and anything over 50k will slingshot you out of the system.


I want to know what formula to use so that I can solve this type of problem.



Answer




If you are in a circular orbit what you need is a Hohmann transfer, from Wikipedia:



In orbital mechanics, the Hohmann transfer orbit /ˈhoʊ.mʌn/ is an elliptical orbit used to transfer between two circular orbits of different radii in the same plane.



It works like this assuming the planet is in a circular orbit.


enter image description here


Then the amount of delta v needed to go from the green orbit to the yellow orbit is. enter image description here


where units are



  • $ v \,\!$ is the speed of an orbiting body


    • $\mu = GM\,\!$ is the standard gravitational parameter of the primary body, assuming $ M+m$ is not significantly bigger than $M$ (which makes $v_M \ll v$)

    • $r \,\!$ is the distance of the orbiting body from the primary focus

    • $a \,\!$ is the semi-major axis of the body's orbit.




Using an online calculator I deduce that the delta v you need is 25.07 km/s


This is independent of the mass of the planet.





Ok, let's start over with a different approach, what is the velocity exactly. Lets just use our trusted elliptical orbits. enter image description here


Then using equations from this link you can calculate the speed at any point of a eclipse with,


$$ v^2 = \mu\left(\frac{2}{r} - \frac{1}{a}\right) $$


which leads to 44.31 km/s at perihelion.


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