As you've calculated, the actual gravitational effects of Venus and Earth (both much larger than Mercury, but also farther away) make the two-body approximation "less than useful" for any real world systems.Įven the stable Earth-Moon libration points (L5 being the most widely known) are not exactly useful: If you read discussions of O'Neill's High Frontier space colonies, you will note that they don't sit at (e.g.) L5, but rather follow dumbell-shaped orbits around it because of the Sun's gravity. You're right, the Sun-Mercury libration points (all five of them) are merely mathematical curiosities of a hypothetical two-body system. Rsq = ((ob.pos - mercury.pos_trailing)**2).sum(axis=0)Īx.set_title('acceleration (m/s^2)', fontsize=16)Īx.get_xaxis().get_major_formatter().set_useOffset(False)Īx.set_title('distance (m)', fontsize=16)įig.suptitle("in Mercury's orbit trailing by 88/6 days", fontsize=16)Īx.set_title('ecliptic projection (m)', fontsize=16) Ob.pos_trailing = ob.ob.at(times_trailing).ecliptic_position().km Ob.pos = ob.ob.at(times).ecliptic_position().km 'uranus barycenter', 'neptune barycenter'] 'jupiter barycenter', 'saturn barycenter', Load = Loader('~/Documents/YourNameHere/SkyData') Dots in last plot are at years = 2024.14 when Venus comes closer than Mercury.įrom skyfield.api import Loader, Topos, EarthSatellite Question: So I'm wondering, does it make sense to talk about Mercury's triangular libration points (L4, L5)? Besides the linked question, has there ever been any proposed missions or even serious discussion about these locations? Or are they really best thought of as orbital mechanical red herrings?īelow: python script and results using the package Skyfield. I then calculated the acceleration it would experience from Mercury, Venus, and Earth for five years, and it turns out that the "perturbations" from Venus and Earth are always stronger, and often much stronger than any guiding or stabilizing effects from Mercury. So I chose a point in space that follows Mercury's orbit, except that it trails it by 1/6 of a period, the approximate temporal equivalent of trailing by 60° would be for a circular orbit. There are a large number of disadvantages and challenges to building or putting a large artificial structure so much closer to the Sun than at the distance of Earth's orbit, and the only advantage I can think of is that you'd have a whole lot of solar power available to deal with those challenges.īut I also wondered if there is even any expectation that there is any meaningful benefit to putting something at one of Mercury's triangular libration points Sun-Mercury L4 or L5 as compared to just putting it in a heliocentric orbit and ignoring Mercury altogether, except of course for not getting hit by it. The recent question How much radiation shielding would be required for a habitat at Mercury–Sun L5? got me thinking.
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