TransX LEO to moon - without mid-course inclination change?

[boogabooga]

I haven't tried the script yet but I did notice the discrepancy in your first photos. Your PeT is 438ks, and it appears that your entering prograde lunar orbit. I like to use transfer times of 250-270 ks into retrograde orbits, because of (almost) free return characteristics, similarity to Apollo, etc.

What I was trying to show was that the offsetting technique was at least better than not, for the same flight time, and otherwise similar flight profiles. I would imagine this will be especially true if the technique used for base alignment was as crude as the stock Map MFD, which was being suggested in the first post.

I fully acknowledge that there are better ways of minimizing total delta-v.

 

[blixel]

The third way is the Belbruno-Miller transfer. Basically you make a transfer to the Moon and sling past it, to an orbit with an apoapsis almost at the edge of Earth's gravity well and a periapsis at the height of the Moon's orbit. Timing it correctly, leads to a low intercept velocity (300 to 400 m/s) instead of the traditional (800-900 m/s). So you get in a lunar orbit without a LOI burn.
The downside of this method is that the flight-time is much longer. (+60 days).

Very interesting. Is this at least somewhat similar to the method NASA used for the Grail mission? I was stunned when I first heard it took over 100 days for those probes to get to the moon.

---------- Post added at 11:43 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:17 PM ----------

Unzip the file in your Orbiter directory and it should go in it's place.

Just a heads up... The zip file puts the script in Challenges/DG/Challenge1 but the scenario file is set to look for it in Challenges/DG/Direct_landing/Challenge1

 

[dgatsoulis]

Yeah, Grail did use that transfer. It was first used on JAXA's Hiten spacecraft in the early '90s and 2 or 3 more times after that.

Have a look at this post for links with some more information.

Thanks for the heads up. The solution is simple: Either create a Direct_landing directory in the Script and place the file in there, or delete the Direct_landing/ part from the scenario.