Orbital dynamics and the moon slingshot

4:52What I like about this is this is an Earth-centric view, okay? So, the moon is orbiting around the Earth and Artemis is going to the moon and back, right? And the camera is sort of moving with the Earth. Now, the Earth itself is rotating around the sun, but in this system, the sun's influence doesn't really matter too much because we can go in that reference frame and all of this is revolving around the sun. So, we can, you know, do that kind of physics transformation. But, if we look at that video again, if you don't mind, um what looks like it to me, when you first look at this thing, right? Artemis is going there and then it just turns around. Yes. And if we notice, it it seems like the moon is doing so much

5:33work to turn the spacecraft around and head it back to Earth, right? Now, let's look at our second video and that is from the moon's position. So, now the camera is moving with the moon and you can see now Artemis is approaching. It's approaching. It's approaching. And it gets slightly deflected. >> Mhm. The moon is actually not doing that much work. Right. So, how do you reconcile these two camera angles? Right? From the camera angle of the Earth, it's like the moon just like slingshot it back. But from the moon's perspective, there's just a tiny bit correction. That kind of makes sense because the moon is not that big. So, what exactly is happening? >> We got to understand that when Artemis

6:14is going towards the moon, it does a single burn, and then it launches towards the moon, right? When it does that, it does that single burn, and then it turns off its engines. So, it's still falling towards the Earth. It's like we threw a baseball up, and that baseball is going to have a really high velocity, but it's going to keep falling and reducing its velocity because the Earth keeps pulling on it. So, if the moon wasn't there, Artemis would go all the way to the moon, go a way over the moon's limit, but still return back to Earth because Artemis does not have escape velocity Mhm. from the Earth. Okay?

6:55>> pull. >> Exactly. So, when we go back to the moon's perspective, yes. Now you see why the moon, even a tiny bit of deflection, is enough to do that slingshot maneuver, right? Artemis is falling towards the Earth this whole time. All the moon is doing is just like nudging it a little bit more to fall towards the Earth as Artemis goes around. >> It's kind of an interesting way to think about perspective in in space, right? It's like Artemis would still return back to Earth, but the moon is just there to kind of like have that slingshot, you know? Just a tiny bit more. >> So, one of the things we covered in our our Artemis episode, um that we previously did a deep dive on. So, if you want more information on this, we've actually covered this

7:36previously, but the launch is super relevant, and I know we have one more graphic to show here. Um