NASA proposes to hook up spaceships to comets to enter deep space

NASA has a lot of great ideas in the last few months. These are submarines on Titan, drones on Mars, and a device melting ice on Europe. Now there is another idea - to use comets to transfer spacecraft attached to such an object for long distances.

For now, this is only an idea, but Masahiro Ono from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory believes that this method of movement can be very effective. At the same time, the implementation of the idea, according to Ono, should not be too difficult. But the “cometary hitchhiking” would allow spacecraft and vehicles to travel throughout the solar system with little expenditure of resources and with great speed.

The author of the idea compares this method of transportation with fishing, in which the fisherman catches a very big fish. She begins to run away from the boat, and pulls the ship behind her, with increasing speed. A similar scheme is proposed by Masahiro Ono for movement on comets: the ship flies up to such an object, harpoons it (the rope here is an especially strong nanofiber), and flies with the comet to the right point in space. Of course, not every comet is suitable for “hitchhiking,” but here you need to work to clarify the comet's trajectory (and the trajectories of a large number are already known) in order to have a good idea of ​​where you can fly using a similar object.
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It calculated the possible trajectories of travel to various objects of the Solar System, and this is what happened: it will be possible to get to Pluto in just 5.5 years, to Houmei in just 9 years. This is almost two times faster than in the case of New Horizons, the probe launched to Pluto back in 2006.

So far, no one has expressed interest in financing such an original project, and it is unclear whether such a concept will be used as a real proposal at all. But there really is a rational grain here, and perhaps in a short time several specialists will work on the project (albeit in their free time), and not just one.

With an accurate calculation of the ship traveling in this original way, do not need a large amount of fuel. And the astronauts, if the ship is with the crew, will be able to study the comet in the “free” time, of which there will be a huge amount. With the help of some technologies, it is possible that the ship’s crew will even be able to receive energy using a “tethered” ship and a comet.



Naturally, a very accurate calculation is needed here - after all, approaching a comet is a difficult task, and even if the connection between the ship and the comet is broken, the ship with the crew (or just the spacecraft) will be lost and it will have almost no chance of returning to Earth.