Grad Talk- Moving the Earth with Gravitational Assists

Abstract: As our sun enters the latter half of its main-sequence lifetime its increasing luminosity will threaten the habitability of our planet within the next billion years. In a 2000 paper, D.G. Korycansky, Gregory Laughlin, and Fred C. Adams developed an unusual proposal to combat this problem: having a rocket-guided Kuiper belt object perform routine flybys of Earth and Jupiter on a ~6000 year period. By performing repeated gravitational assists, a fraction of Jupiter's orbital energy would be transferred to the Earth over a billion-year timescale, increasing Earth's orbital radius to 1.5 AU to negate the effects of increasing solar luminosity. I will describe this outlandish proposal, introducing the basics of astrodynamics and gravitational assists along the way, and show that the craziest thing about moving the Earth is how technically feasible it turns out to be. 
 
** Refreshments served from 2:45pm – 3:00pm in PAS 218. Please join us for the colloquium in PAS 224. Thank you. **