Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Phobos orbit injection

Mars doesn't own a lot of air, compared with (oh) Venus fit for some cheap delta-V correction. But Mars does own some. Back in 2019 Buzz Aldrin mooted, for payload: an aerobraking probe destination-Phobos.

This blog's first preference for a fourth-ring Solar System base is Deimos. Deimos has less gravity and is further up, than Phobos.

But a Phobos orbiter, even with a lander, isn't nothing. Say the delivery has several small-cargo units. Also if we're doing Mars at all then a base on Phobos makes Martian interplanetary intercourse a lot cheaper.

What Aldrin has done here is open direct imports to Phobos from the solar-system without need for Deimos, which at least relieves Deimos' traffic-control. Deimos remains best-placed to handle Phobos' nondigital exports, and imports of anything heavy and/or fragile - like humans.

How Aldrin gets to the Martian system matters. Aldrin here assumes the least delta-V effort, the one way Hohmann. Aldrin in 1985ish had another trajectory, the flyby-and-return-to-Earth cycler. After some years Earth gets the shipping back, which may even be a human maintenance-crew; I expect it scales better than Hohmann. But a delta-V cost hits the flyby for anything dropped from the container.

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