Гравитационный маневр в космонавтике

Space navigation technique
powered flybys

A gravity assist, gravity assist maneuver, swing by, or generally a gravitational slingshot in orbital mechanics, is a type of spaceflight flyby which makes use of the relative movement (e. g. orbit around the Sun) and gravity of a planet or other astronomical object to alter the path and speed of a spacecraft, typically to save propellant and reduce expense. Gravity assistance can be used to accelerate a spacecraft, that is, to increase or decrease its speed or redirect its path. The "assist" is provided by the motion of the gravitating body as it pulls on the spacecraft. Any gain or loss of kinetic energy and linear momentum by a passing spacecraft is correspondingly lost or gained by the gravitational body, in accordance with Newton's Third Law. The gravity assist maneuver was first used in 1959 when the Soviet probe Luna 3 photographed the far side of Earth's Moon, and it was used by interplanetary probes from Mariner 10 onward, including the two Voyager probes' notable flybys of Jupiter and Saturn.

A gravity assist around a planet changes a spacecraft's velocity (relative to the Sun) by entering and leaving the gravitational sphere of influence of a planet. The spacecraft's speed increases as it approaches the planet and decreases as it leaves the planet. To increase speed, the spacecraft approaches the planet in the same direction the planet is orbiting the Sun, and departs in the opposite direction. To decrease speed, the spacecraft approaches the planet traveling the opposite direction from planet's orbital velocity. In both types of maneuver the energy transfer compared to the planet's total orbital energy is negligible. The sum of the kinetic energies of both bodies remains constant (see elastic collision). A slingshot maneuver can therefore be used to change the spaceship's trajectory and speed relative to the Sun. A close terrestrial analogy is provided by a tennis ball bouncing off the front of a moving train. Imagine standing on a train platform, and throwing a ball at 30 km/h toward a train approaching at 50 km/h. The driver of the train sees the ball approaching at 80 km/h and then departing at 80 km/h after the ball bounces elastically off the front of the train. Because of the train's motion, however, that departure is at 130 km/h relative to the train platform; the ball has added twice the train's velocity to its own. Translating this analogy into space: in the planet reference frame, the spaceship has a vertical velocity of v relative to the planet. After the slingshot occurs the spaceship is leaving on a course 90 degrees to that which it arrived on. It will still have a velocity of v, but in the horizontal direction. Realistic portrayals of encounters in space require the consideration of three dimensions. The same principles apply as above except adding the planet's velocity to that of the spacecraft requires vector addition as shown below. Due to the reversibility of orbits, gravitational slingshots can also be used to reduce the speed of a spacecraft. Both Mariner 10 and MESSENGER performed this maneuver to reach Mercury. If more speed is needed than available from gravity assist alone, a rocket burn near the periapsis (closest planetary approach) uses the least fuel. A given rocket burn always provides the same change in velocity (Δv), but the change in kinetic energy is proportional to the vehicle's velocity at the time of the burn. Therefore the maximum kinetic energy is obtained when the burn occurs at the vehicle's maximum velocity (periapsis). The Oberth effect describes this technique in more detail.

In his paper "To Those Who Will Be Reading in Order to Build" ("Тем, кто будет читать, чтобы строить"), published in 1938 but dated 1918–1919, Yuri Kondratyuk suggested that a spacecraft traveling between two planets could be accelerated at the beginning and end of its trajectory by using the gravity of the two planets' moons. The portion of his manuscript considering gravity assists received no later development and was not published until the 1960s. In his 1925 paper "Problems of Flight by Jet Propulsion: Interplanetary Flights" ("Проблема полета при помощи реактивных аппаратов: межпланетные полеты"), Friedrich Zander showed a deep understanding of the physics behind the concept of gravity assist and its potential for the interplanetary exploration of the solar system. In 1961, Michael Minovitch, UCLA graduate student who worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), developed a gravity assist technique, that would later be used for the Gary Flandro's Planetary Grand Tour idea. During the summer of 1964 at the NASA JPL, Gary Flandro was assigned the task of studying techniques for exploring the outer planets of the solar system. In this study he discovered the rare alignment of the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) and conceived the Planetary Grand Tour multi planet mission utilizing gravity assist to reduce mission duration from forty years to less than ten.

[[File:Voyager 2 velocity vs distance from sun. svg|thumb|Plot of Voyager 2's heliocentric velocity against its distance from the Sun, illustrating the use of gravity assist to accelerate the spacecraft by Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. To observe Triton, Voyager 2 passed over Neptune's north pole resulting in an acceleration out of the plane of the ecliptic and reduced velocity away from the Sun. General relativity predicts that a spinning black hole is surrounded by a region of space, called the ergosphere, within which standing still (with respect to the black hole's spin) is impossible, because space itself is dragged at the speed of light in the same direction as the black hole's spin. The Penrose process may offer a way to gain energy from the ergosphere, although it would require the spaceship to dump some "ballast" into the black hole, and the spaceship would have had to expend energy to carry the "ballast" to the black hole.