Hitchhikers Guide to Lunar Orbit

I’m an orbital mechanics engineer at ESA and I wouldn’t have explained it better 👏🏼👏🏼

This is mathematically and physically beautiful and I cannot imagine the happiness the original scientists felt when putting all of this together

Danuri is Korea’s first lunar satellite! It wasn’t originally planned to do these harder, efficient orbit maneuvers but they kept adding new equipments and sensors to the satellite to a point where they had no options but to take the harder approach. Crazy considering that this is our first spacecraft to the moon. Anyways, huge thanks to Scott for covering space launches and projects from Korea in your videos!

Thinking of the Lagrange points as low effective potential "portals" between Hill spheres is an amazing insight. Thanks for sharing it. I've seen (and derived) the effective potential contour maps many, many times in my life, but never thought of the implications in quite this way. It certainly makes the captures, whether planned or accidental, so much more intuitive.

It's kinda crazy that only 50 meters of dV is enough to go past Moon to the edge of Earth's sphere of influence.

Awesome stuff, n-body physics interactions are fascinating. Have you heard of the Interplanetary Transport Network? It's the concept that all these chaotic interactions create 'pathways' between the Lagrange points of pretty much every body in the solar system. From the Moon to Jupiter, without a single drop of fuel. You'll just need a LOT of patience. (for everything to line up, and for all the natural gravity assists...)

Did my PhD on ballistic capture, worked with Ed Belbruno at Princeton University, and I'm currently an active researcher on this topic. Yet, I'm always fascinated by this concept as the first days I started studying it.

I really need to try one of these with the Principia mod one of these days. Amazing stuff and the 3D diagram of gravity around the lagrange points really makes everything click into place.

I never thought of using Universe Sandbox to reverse engineer orbits like that. Now I have something new to play with. Thanks, Scott. I also am quite surprised that these techniques were developed only very recently.

I remember reading about Bellbruno's work a little over a decade ago. I hunted him down online and emailed him to ask if it was possible to recreate this kind of orbit on the space flight simulator called Orbiter. He actually wrote me back with all kinds of diagrams and explanations. I still haven't been able to totally recreate it on Orbiter but your video helps out a lot. Thanks.

I've struggled to visualize how bodies are captured into orbits without delta-V. Now it's crystal clear. Thank you.

I know someone who worked on the Lunar Flashlight mission, learning more about it is so cool :O

I'd be really interested to hear much mass (as a percentage of the spacecraft's mass) these maneuvers save the craft's designers. Seems like it has to be substantial for the time and effort they spend to perform it successfully! The calculation and risk assessment that must go into it is mind-boggling.

Kudos to your acknowledgment of Ed Bellbruno and his contribution to object deployment in the space environment.

I took a class this last semester that focused entirely on finding periodic and quasi-periodic orbits and orbital transfers in the circular restricted 3 body problem, as well as extending these results to find solutions in ephemeris models. Fascinating stuff and really cool to see it used in real life!!

Seeing that capture tube extend all the way out from the moon was so cool!! It really helped tie the concept together in my head as well. ❤

Awesome video. Love the casual solving of a 4-body problem by 2 x 3-bidy problems!

Great stuff Scott. I love your deep-dives in orbital mechanics.

I think if you did a video on coordinate transformations, you'd have enough material to just teach a university orbital mechanics course. Certainly better than the one I got...

Who would've thunk that rocket science was this complex

Great stuff. I heave a sigh of relief over straightforward mechanical explanations. This is a perfect public level of science. Well done!

That is amazing. Thank you Ed Belbruno for discovering these orbits. Genius!

This is so high level, big respect Mr. Manley!

Great video! Love this kind of content. Very informative and not too computation-intensive!

I got to see Scott. I always look forward to watching your videos. Awesome stuff. Thanks for all your time and energy. Excellent job.

That is absolutely wild. Blew my mind. The illustrations really do it justice. Thanks for documenting this!

Every time I read or hear somebody proposing that a planet "captured" a passing body and made it a moon, I think of the delicate - and extremely unlikely - orbital mechanics required to make that possible. You'd need some sort of decelerating collision, at just the right time and place, to act as an "insertion burn". (Anybody think that tidal forces could enable the process, given enough time?)

The way I think about it is basically a bi-elliptic transfer from LEO to the moon's orbit, but using the Sun's gravity to perform the velocity change at apogee.

0:30 What a very sturdy-looking orbit. I don't think a grade 7 pupil could (/would) have done better (/differently.)

Orbital Mechanics has become much more complex (and cooler) than what I studied in the 1980s!

At a high level this makes sense. At a detail level of actual calculations it's a nightmare of instabilities and corrections and changing coordinates between earth, moon and sun. Glad someone else is doing the number crunching.

Scott, excellent work! Very informative for me personally!! Some i's dotted, some t's crossed, so thank you!! 👌 🚀 Fly safe!! 🙏

I've been curious about this for my entire life. I never thought it was something I could understand. Thank you so much Scott! You are an amazing teacher.

Amazeballs video mate. I learned a new level in my education on orbital mechanics. So cool.

well done. tracking these satellites has required an upscaling of my orbital dynamics and this is a great discussion/explanation hope the flying is going well. RGO

Fabulous video and explanation! Loved it! Thank you Edward Belbruno

Bravo, Scott! One of your best explanations.

Wow, Scott, I’ve always had a trouble getting my head around body influences, until you explained langrange points like a topological map and it blew my mind, thank you so much.

This video contains some of the best illustrations and explanations of Lagrange points and orbital mechanics that I’ve ever encountered. Thanks!

Nothing like a fantastic orbital trajectory vid. Awesome, thank u sir!

This stuff is so cool! It's become perhaps my favorite area of space/science. Thank you Scott, we are all lucky you know this so well. Fly safe!

This is a great example on how to do terrific outreach, kudos to Scott. I am a PhD Candidate at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and at the Deep-space Astrodynamics Research and Technology (DART) group we are currently researching on how to engineer the ballistic capture mechanism for autonomous interplanetary CubeSats with limited onboard resources. We have released in open access on Zenodo a dataset of initial conditions granting temporary capture at Mars in case you are interested!

Fabulous work, really clear. 😊

That is realy well explained. Thank you kind Sir

Somehow the video title gave me "The 10 Best Lunar Transfer Orbits and Number 8 Might Surprise You" vibes 😄

To really understand this stuff you need to have some background iin KAM theory (Kolmogorov- Arnold-Moser ) in the context of dynamical systems. Helmut Hofer has done some good Princeton IAS videos on the technical issues in the context of explaining what Ed Belbruno did with the Hiten probe and the concept of ballistic capture. Ed was one of Jurgen Moser's students. Dynamical system stuff is pretty deep - according to Helmut when Ed came up with his idea of saving Hiten many of his colleagues said he was nuts but his ideas worked.

Nice video, but you got a few things wrong. 0:19 Hakuto-R is a landing demonstration programme. The lander is simply called Series 1. The rover is Rashid and is a payload here. 12:00 Hiten is MUSES-A yes, but the smaller satellite is Hagoromo. It's not actually known if Hagoromo made it into orbit because the antennae failed and they were unable to verify its orbit :(. MUSES-B is a radio telescope satellite, not a part of the Hiten mission.

Wow... just as I feel I am starting to make my way up the second mountain, Scott Manley firmly puts me back onto the first mountain of the Dunning-Kruger peaks. Thank you for teaching us these awesome things!

As I watched the video, I wondered if you would get around to giving Ed Belbruno the credit he deserves. I was the Lunar GAS system engineer, Kerry Nock was the project leader, so I saw genius at work. Ed explained the math to me in the hall at JPL. I am still in awe.

Thanks for the lowdown, Scott! Hello from Vandenberg Space Force Base!

Thank you for this video. I have been wanting to better understand how the vehicles get into orbits and transfer to other orbits since the Artemis 1 mission.

Love this type of vid from Scott!!! xxx

This was brilliantly explained! TYSM!

How timely! I started learning in ernest about Lagrange, yesterday. This is a fantastic example! Fly safe. :)

Using L1 & L2, LaGrange Points for a Ballistic slowdown into lunar orbit is a neat idea. 🚀🌙

Very understandable explanation, thank you, Scott!

Wow, well done. You answered my question! Great video.

This is brilliant Scott thanks.

Awesome explanation, thank you Scott!

I listened to everything that you said. all very interesting. I am writing to commend you for your interest and understanding of all things space and for helping us mere mortals grasp the details.

I don't remember any explanation this intuitive, ever!👍👍👍

Great explanation of a complicated subject!

Brilliant explanation. Thanks so much.

Excellent video! I wondered about the Artemis mission timeline from the moment I first saw it published - since I remember hearing about Sputnik, and remember watching Vanguard 1 fall back and explode on the pad, am an Apollo junkie, and have been in the space game ever since. My very favorite book of any genre is Richard Battin's "An Introduction to the Methods and Mathematics of Astrodynamics", and despite its deep mathematical insights, it contains nothing of this sophistication. Thank you so much for this one, Mr. Manley!

This was one of the most interesting videos about space exploration i've seen!

I learned quite a bit from this video. Thank you for all this.

Universe Sandbox is really amazing! Great video!

I saw many Apollo lunar landing profiles like the one at 0:43 drawn on walls in many cities. Never knew taggers are such space fans.

Thank you very much for this explanation!

Thank you, Scott!

Brilliant talk thanks Scott

That was good Scott, comprehendible~

Very good explanatory video. Thank you.

Once clearly explained like this, surfing on gravitational forces seems pretty intuitive. I hope KSP2 will have some kind of n-body simulation. That would be so much fun to improvise a last resort trajectory around a L point to prevent Jeb being slingshoted towards the sun. Er. I mean.... that would be so much intellectual satisfaction to carefully plan in advance complex missions using such gravitational tricks. Of course.

It’s honestly amazing that at 26 I basically grew up in a world where n-body simulations are trivial. I know about this stuff, but every time I hear about more of the specifics of how this stuff actually works the more it’s incredible anybody not only solved 3+ body problems by hand, but that we figured out how to make computers solve them for us. The more you learn about engineering the more you realize how insanely unbelievably useful computers have been for science. It’s not all about social media lol. The speed of computation allows brute force methods like this. You would spend a million lifetimes solving 10,000 4 body problems by hand, but nasa supercomputers can back date probably a million possibilities in a reasonable amount of time and we have these orbits that basically just would be incomprehensible without computers. We have the knowledge to understand the process without computers, we just don’t have the power to calculate that fast as humans.

Very informative.. thank you.

Taking advantage of the highly-complex locations where a minute bit of thrust can produce massive differences in trajectory. Simply brilliant.

Thanks! That was fascinating.

SUPER, frist time I’ve had a explanation that made sense. Nice job.

Thanks for talking about this!

This was awesome! I don't think I could do the math, but you explained it perfectly.

this is really cool I had the opportunity to make a thesis related to this I could get to know a little about the work of belbruno and Ross (the green red images you showed) great job

You really are so good at distilling down complex concepts and serving them up in easily digested bites of information. In other words, you dumb it down real good so that even dodos like me can follow the plot. Kudos! No, seriously, this was a really good video. Make more!

Really exciting stuff!

So good! Thanks for explaining this beyond-Kerbal idea with such detail and diagrams. Drinking wine at conferences paid off, surely this justifies a bit more?

Amazing explanation

Thank you for educating me.

the amount of computation required for these lovely dances still blows my mind and the amount of wacky imagination required to conceive these orbits blows my mind out past pluto

More like this please Scott!

i dont want to take anything away from this very great video explaining the complexity and challenges one takes to get to the moon... but that damn first picture.... XD

I learned something today, cheers 😊

Happy Xmas Cousin Scott🎄☃️🎅

These types of discussions are WAY outside my pay grade, but I can still appreciate the thought & the amount of computations that it requires. Stay curious!

So well explained, thanks. 😜

So interesting one, thanks!

This was incredible!

Fascinating! 🤩

Oooohh... I've actually been very interested in this!

Would've been nice to hear about this in any of my orbits or GNC classes. Lol. Though maybe I got through before this was much known. Welp. That's why I follow people like you Scott.