Gravity bytes

The affect of gravitational sources on an object is really just a sum of the vector fields for each gravitational body at a certain point in space. This is our last addition to the hovercraft-cum- spaceship model. With the added gravity, we can perform gravity assists, thereby reducing some of the fuel we use (yeahh!).

Conclusions

RRTs are not just good designed for terrestrial objects. By exploring an interesting situation, new solutions emerge. The techniques discussed here(on a much simplified level) could easily have been used to plot the course of the Voyager deep space probes as they whizzed by planets.

By adding predictive paths for the orbits of the planets and other gravitationally intense objects in the solar system, RRTs can easily be beneficial to the scientists at NASA.

The one thing that can be slightly annoying about RRTs is the expected time to solution. Running the same scenario several times can return answers in 8000 iterations or 80000 iterations. This is due to the fact that RRTs are just that: random. Sometimes you hit on the correct configuration, sometimes you don't.


Steven Bergom
Last modified: Thu Apr 29 19:19:47 CDT 1999