Adam Hibberd
I have been slogging away at the usual old astrodynamics which I seem to have made my particular field of expertise, and in the process receiving some degree of flack from certain parties. I do this not for the money – clearly since I’m a lowly volunteer – but for the sheer fun of it, and it so happens on this occasion the work I’m doing is quite important also.
Is it indeed possible for the Juno spacecraft, now orbiting Jupiter to come closer to the 3rd interstellar object to be discovered, 3I/ATLAS?
The first step was to find the possible intercept opportunities using my own software development Optimum Interplanetary Trajectory Software (OITS), and it was serendipitous that my colleagues, Avi Loeb, Adam Crowl, with me leading on the celestial mechanics side, had embarked on this course since it turned out the date of DeltaV application for Juno to intercept 3I/ATLAS at its closest approach (in March 2026) was as soon as mid-August or alternatively mid-September of this year.
So surprised we were at these results, we decided to publish a paper and notify the NASA personnel responsible for the Juno mission, asap.
Having achieved this aim quite expeditiously in the end, we could then go about honing the research down to the more salient question, of how close might Juno be able to get to 3I/ATLAS GIVEN IT MAY NOT BE ABLE TO DELIVER the required DeltaV for an exact intercept?
To this end I developed some REBOUND software for the investigations, which also exploited the NASA JPL NAIF toolset known as SPICE as well as the NLP solver NOMAD. Go here to look at the latest version of the paper.
Note that this study assumed one application of DeltaV only and furthermore, examined two launch windows for reaching 3I/ATLAS, in mid-August and mid-September. I provide the results below.
Once NASA has provided the necessary information, we shall then be able to move forward and investigate more complicated scenarios, such as the multiple-impulse case, which adds significantly to the NOMAD solution time and increases the likelihood of convergence to local optima.
For the moment the above plots are hugely encouraging since, as we can see, that for as little as 5.4% of the initial propellant mass, Juno could quite easily get within 27 million km of the target.