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All Photos and illustrations, CREDIT Space X and/or NASA unless stated otherwise.

Right now it looks like Elon Musk may beat NASA to Mars with his plan to get us there sometime in the 2020’s, and the Musk plan calls for COLONIZATION, not just a short stay to plant the flag and leave some footprints on Mars.

Sounds pretty ambitious, but I wouldn’t bet against a guy who  invented Pay Pal, sold it  a few years later for 150 million bucks or so; then established Tesla Motor car company; Space X; and other thriving companies that seems to be doing quite well.

Now Mr. Musk has developed manufacturing facilities to build new and more efficient rocket engines to power his Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) which uses 42 of the new “Raptor” engines in the booster to fling people and supplies to Mars until the colony becomes self sufficient and will be the second planet for us homosapiens to call home.

In case you missed the news, a photo of a prototype fuel tank that will cary the liquid oxygen required to provide power for the huge MCT rocket has already been built – – see below.

Notice the workers standing at the bottom of the tank for size comparison.

Yes, it takes a lot of fuel to power the 42 Raptor rocket engines because the MCT will be a really B-I-G rocket – – well over 10,000 tons on the launch pad ready for lift-off.

What will the whole thing look like ?? (you might want to know).

The MCT has yet to be built and the Saturn V , if one still exists, is probably in a museum or junk yard – somewhere.  So, I did some cut/paste and came up with the illustration you see below . . .

The small white blob near the lower left-hand corner of the this illustration is to show the relative size of a human compared to the rockets. The Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) will be used both for carrying passengers (about 100 per trip) and/or cargo from Earth to Mars during the colonization process; a process that is intended to transport about a million Colonists to Mars over a period of up to 100 years. The plan call for the initial small colony of about 20,000 colonists on Mars by 2050, or so . . .

Artists illustration of initial relatively small Colony on Mars.

The Musk Mars Plan (MMP) calls for launch Pad #39 at JFK Space Center in Florida to be updated to accommodate the Mars Colonial Transporter.

The entire colonization process will require thousands of trips to Mars in order to transport about one million colonists to Mars.

This goal seems a bit optimistic, but Mr. Musk may surprise me, and others who question his ambitions. In any event, I think the colonization of Mars is a much better way to spend our time and treasure than continuing to build more and better killing machines so we can keep the military/Industrial complex in business.

But that’s a subject for another day.

Meanwhile, I have gathered enough information and graphics for a couple more posts about the Musk Mars Plan (MMP) and I hope to have have them organized, edited, and ready for publication soon.

Trojans, Greeks, Hildas, Horseshoes and Tadpoles

Everyone on Earth past the age of 2 probably has at least a casual acquaintance with the Moon. A bit beyond 2 years of age we learn that the Moon tags along during the Earth’s yearly orbit around the sun. Some folks become interested and eventually become stargazers, sometimes known as “back yard astronomers”, like me. A select few, unlike me, get well educated and become rich and/or famous

Be that as it may, let’s take a quick look at what I call the “Earth – Moon System”.

As some (most??) readers probably already know, there are many objects in addition to the Moon that share Earth’s orbital path around the Sun. To understand how that works we must look a little deeper into the Sun-Earth system, as illustrated in the graphic, below (borrowed from Wikipedia and NOT to scale). There are some interesting things and happenings there . . .


An asteroid, or other massive body, can orbit the Lagrange Points (small blue dots) labeled L1, L2, L3, and L4. This is a bit odd because there is really nothing solid located at a Lagrange Point – a Lagrange Point is a confluence of gravity force from relatively nearby objects, in this illustration, where the gravity from the Sun and the Earth come together.

Yes, the gravity from the Moon is also involved, but that complicates things (and makes for a messy illustration)  so let’s ignore that, for now.

These Lagrange Points are relatively small Gravity Wells, sometimes called Gravity Dimples, in the fabric of Space-Time, as illustrated, below, which I have borrowed from Wikipedia.



Gravity wells or dimples, are a way to understand how gravity works without doing the math.

All we need to know in order to understand what causes Lagrange Points is that anything that has mass can create a depression in Space-Time and the “depression” is what causes what we call “gravity” to happen.

Here is an illustration (borrowed from Wikipedia) that (sort of) illustrates this concept . . .



If an object is massive enough it creates a very deep Gravity Well that produces a “Black Hole”, but that’s a story for another day.

That’s quite enough cosmology for now – let’s get back to Trojans, and such.
Earth’s only Trojan, named 2010 TK7, is a 300-meter diameter Asteroid.

The name “Trojan” was first used in 1906 for Jupiter’s Trojans, the asteroids that were observed near the Lagrangian points of Jupiter’s orbit (see below). “Trojan” is sometimes used as a generic term for all objects that orbit around Lagrange Points, and sometimes used for specific Lagrange Points L1, L2, L3, and/or L4.

Notice in the illustration below that the objects are referred to Trojans (green), Hildas (red), and Greeks (also green) depending upon which Lagrange point they gather around. In order to clarify which Trojan or Trojans are being referenced, double -Naming, such as “Greek-Trojan” or “Hilda-Trojan” are used.

Note, also, the Asteroid Belt in white. At the scale of this drawing, Earth’s one Trojan is not visible.

One other note of interest – – it is quite good neighborly of Jupiter with its huge gravity well to capture all those Trojans, Greeks, and Hildas because some of them were probably headed toward Earth and could have done considerable damage when they collided with our home planet.

For a more detailed discussion (including the names) of about 150 of Jupiter’s Trojans, I suggest a visit to Wikipedia – it would require multiple pages to include all the information here on this blog entry.

Getting back to Earth . . .

2010 TK7, A 300-meter-diameter asteroid, discovered and photographed using the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is the only confirmed Earth Trojan. Earth’s lonely Trojan orbits the L4 Lagrange point traveling “in front” of Earth in the Earth’s orbit.

2010 TK7 is shown below in the green circle near lower right-hand corner of the infrared photo, just below the brightest star in the photo

There are a dozen or so additional objects in the Earth-Moon “family” and they have rather strange “orbits” as they follow or lead along Earth’s orbital path.

A horseshoe orbit is a complex orbital motion of a small orbiting body (such as an  asteroid) relative to a larger orbiting body (such as a planet). The orbital period of the smaller body is very nearly the same as for the larger body, and its path appears to have a horseshoe shape in a rotating reference frame as viewed from the larger object, as in the drawing of the Sun-Earth-Moon system shown below.

The lighter gray lines represent gravity, which determines the path of Horseshoe orbit (green).

The loop is not closed but will drift forward or backward slightly on each orbit, so that the point it circles will appear to move smoothly along the larger body’s orbit over a long period of time. When the object approaches the Earth closely at either end of its trajectory, its apparent direction changes. Over an entire cycle the center traces the outline of a horseshoe, with the larger body between the ‘horns’.

Asteroids in horseshoe orbits with respect to Earth include 54509 YORP, 2002 AA29, and 2010 SO16.
In closing, there are other types of Trojan orbits, one is called the “Tadpole” because it traces an outline resembling a tadpole. The blue triangles around L4 and L5 illustrate the outline of the Tadpole orbits. Another one is called a “Halo” orbit because it is less complicated (more “normal”) than the other types of orbits.

By the way, the James Web Space Telescope (JWST) scheduled to be launched in October 2018 ( if the U.S. Congress continues to fund it) will be placed in orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange Point.

– – –  END of Lagrange Points, etc.  – – –