Buzz Aldrin has created what he calls a “Star Cycler” which
and
So my questions are:
1.) What path would it take to accomplish this? I can’t imagine how the orbital path is laid out.
2.) Could this be done with Earth and any other planets? I’m WAGging that it could be done between Earth and Venus, and Aldrin says it could be done between the Earth and the Moon, but what about Earth and Jupiter or Earth and Saturn? Would it have to go above the orbital plane of the solar system?
3.) Any idea of how long it would take such a system to go between Earth and Jupiter or Earth and Saturn? (Not that there’s really any need for such a system.)
I would imagine all you need to do is find a Mars/Earth crossing asteroid. Part of its orbit would bring it near enough to Earth to be useful. I suppose we could tweak the orbit so that it falls into periodic crossings every X months.
I suppose (again) that the same asteroid could be used Venus if the path was correct. Though why you would want to get to Venus, aside from Magellan type projects, escapes me.
Most asteroids do not go anywhere near Jupiter as far as I know. Mainly because those that do get consumed. Jupiter acts much like a vacuum sucking in anything that periodically crosses its path. Any asteroid passing Jupiter often enough over time would likely get eaten.
The problem with this is that the periods of Earth, Mars, and such an asteroid would all be out of whack. By the time it got back to Earth’s orbit again, Earth would be somewhere else entirely. Or, you could make it so that it matched up with Earth, but then it wouldn’t work with Mars.
What you need is something that executes a sort of figure-eight around Earth and Mars with a period equal to Mars’s synodic period (about 26 months). It’s not a piece of cake to work something like that out, but it could probably be done with a lot of math.
