Plot your own space missions with new NASA website

For the first time, NASA is giving the public a detailed look into how they plot the flight-plans for spacecraft missions.

Sending a spacecraft out to another planet or object in the solar system isn't an easy task. It takes careful timing of the launch, and careful planning of both the spacecraft's speed and path. The looping trajectories available to a spacecraft for any mission can be fairly simple, or they be complicated enough that the craft has to actually loop back to Earth before it finally heads off to its destination.

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Using the Mission Design Center Trajectory Browser, anyone can now see the potential missions that are available to any object in the solar system.

There are some limits to the browser, such as only being able to plot mission leaving Earth by 2040 at the latest, and taking a maximum of 21 years to complete, but those are really just practical limitations (and hopefully we'll have better propulsion systems by then). Also, it takes a bit of practice in adjusting the variables to get trajectories to some of the outer planets. For example, to get to Pluto, make sure you choose a 'flyby' mission with a high 'ΔV' value — ΔV being the change in velocity.

Once you've entered in some good values, the browser returns a table of results, each a dot that you can click on that brings up a plot of the trajectory.

Say you want to plot a round-trip flyby mission to Mars. The browser returns the following results.

Each dot represents a specific departure date and mission duration. The colour of the dot is the Earth-departure speed (referencing the scale on the right). A lower speed means less fuel used, thus a lower mission cost, which helps get your mission approved.

Choosing the dark blue dot that represents a 3-year mission leaving in January 2014, because it uses the lowest speed and thus the lowest amount of fuel, shows this trajectory:

It even lets you play the mission like a movie, using the buttons below the trajectory plot, and you can highlight the different parts of the mission by sliding your cursor over the different entries on the itinerary on the right. In this case, it's a fairly direct flight to get to Mars, as the spacecraft and the Red Planet rendezvous at the green x on Mars' orbit. After that, the spacecraft loops around back to its starting point. However, by the time it gets back to where it started, the Earth is on the opposite side of the Sun, so it needs to make one more full orbit around the Sun before it can meet up with the Earth again.

They've provided some samples if you just want to see trajectories in action, but check out the user guide for a full list of instructions if you want to plot out some of your own.

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This application is probably just a bit of fun for us in the general public (although it can be a great educational tool), but NASA making this publicly available will also help out those private companies that are looking to jump into the space-exploration game. It'll probably be awhile before we see any private ventures to anywhere beyond Mars, but this tool will definitely make it easier to plan them.

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