As humanity seeks to expand its presence at and around the Moon, researchers have been hard at work fine-tuning small details that could make or break a lunar mission. One team says it has mathematically mapped out the most fuel-efficient route to the Moon yet. According to a recent Astrodynamics paper, the new route lowers the costs of fuel consumption by 58.80 meters per second (m/s) compared to known calculations. For the analysis, the team employed the theory of functional connections, a mathematical framework that solves constrained optimization problems without requiring costly spaceflight computer simulations. The team behind the new study simulated 30 million different routes, comparing its calculations with hundreds of thousands of previous simulations from other groups. “When it comes to space travel, every meter per second equates to a massive amount of fuel consumption,” Allan Kardec de Almeida Júnior, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, said in a statement.
Trekking the skies Needless to say, sending a spacecraft to the Moon isn’t as simple as asking Google Maps for the shortest route from your location to the nearest subway station. According to NASA, planning the flight path of spacecraft takes careful consideration of many factors, such as trajectory design, orbit reconstruction, tracking the spacecraft’s position and velocity, predicting its future path, and the tools navigators use to control the spacecraft once it’s in space.
