Adam Hibberd
Just been asked is it likely or even possible that 3I/ATLAS, the latest interstellar object originating from some distant Milky Way location, will perform some kind of manoeuvre on its way to Jupiter to rendezvous with it.
My standard response to such questions is that 3I/ATLAS is a comet.
Yet nevertheless, it can be fun to contemplate such a scenario, and I shall not be dissuaded by anyone from doing so, for whatever reason.
I SHALL exercise my imagination if I so desire, sure it is a flight of fancy, but human psyche finds excellent nourishment from creativity and fantasy, and I loathe any rigid dogma that clamps down on that.
Thus the answer to the question is that the level of non-gravitational accelerations observed in 3I/ATLAS are generally FAR lower than those I derived in my paper with Avi Loeb and Adam Crowl, and so it is unlikely that 3I/ATLAS is attempting to use any low-thrust propulsion method to conduct a rendezvous of the planet.
However, high thrust propulsion is an entirely different matter. Currently 3I/ATLAS will side-step Jupiter by a full 0.36 Sun-Earth distances. This turns out to be exactly the Laplace sphere radius for the Sun/Jupiter system.
Another way of looking at it is that this is the approximate border line between Jupiter having a meaningful influence on 3I/ATLAS’s orbital path and the Sun’s influence taking over.
So if 3I/ATLAS wants to rendezvous with the planet, then it will need to deliver a pretty high thrust VERY SOON to ensure it comes within a reasonable distance of Jupiter to allow it to stay in an orbit bound to the planet.
A rendezvous thrust at Jupiter will also be needed, though as discussed in the paper, 3I/ATLAS can be slowed by AERO-CAPTURE exploiting Jupiter’s very thick atmosphere to decelerate the object to below Jupiter’s escape velocity and stay orbiting Jupiter, thus obviating the object needing any precious propellant to achieve capture.