Open the scenario, New features - Visual enhancements - New Mir.
Its 1:30am on March 14 2001 and we are in the Delta Glider docked to Mir Station with the moon sitting in view just beyond.
Bring
up the Align MFD and target the moon, you should be around seven
degrees Rinc, so lets undock and pull back a little from Mir. First
task is to align planes
so get the Rinc down to near zero. Go for it! I'll be here when you
come back... Notice that we are already at an altitude of just over
300K, a good orbit to start from. If you run this mission again from the
ground, remember your target orbit will need to be 300K for the "burn
by the numbers" explained below to work. This method is the easy because
we don't have to do any math.
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Once
Aligned with the moon bring up the Surface MFD and the Map MFD. The Map
MFD will
show you the position of both your
vessel and the moon in their current orbit around the earth. To reach
the moon wait until the moon ( yellow + ) is 127 degrees to the right of
your vessel. You may read the position
of the moon in the Map MFD in degrees and the position of your ship in
the Surface MFD. When the difference between the two is 127
degrees orient your ship prograde and
begin to burn. Bring up the Orbit MFD so you can watch the telemetry.
Burn until the Eccentricity ( Ecc ) is 0.9670. This will place your ApD
just under 400M. This burn should last
three or four minutes but make sure you watch the numbers so you don't
over shoot. If you target the moon in the Orbit MFD you can watch
the green elliptic grow and intersect
the moons orbit, the brown circle. I usually ease off my thrust near the
end of the burn to get the best numbers. If you over shoot you can
always
apply a little retro thrust to remove
some energy.
Sit back and coast for the next few days while we approach the moon. You
will want to warp to 100x or even 1000x to speed things up. I usually
wait to I'm a little bit away from the
Earth before I knock it up to 1000x. Only thing to do now is watch the
brown line, moon current position and the green line, ship position.
More importantly
watch the gravity reading at the bottom
of the MFD. This will tell you when you are in the moons sphere of
influence, SOI.
When
the G indicator turns form brown to red the ship is then out of the
Earths
SOI and now under the suns SOI. We must
wait until we are close enough to the moon to be under its SOI. By
bringing up the HUD in Orbit mode it will
display [ Moon ] in the upper left of
the screen when you get close enough. Once under the moons SOI orient
the ship prograde and you should be pointed
near the moon. At this time bring up a
second Orbit MFD and set the reference to the moon. This will display a
much more accurate flight path. Fly until the you reach apoapsis. At apoapsis
maneuver retrograde and burn until you have a Ped
at the desired orbit. Next time around
you can circularize your orbit. Congratulations you made it to the moon!
Of
course you can launch from the ground at any time and use the same
method as above to reach the moon.
The advantage is that you can align the
planes during launch and be ready to set up the burn at 127 degrees
counter clockwise to the moon. Only be
sure to begin the burn at an altitude of 300K for the burn calculations
are figured for this starting point. As you know burning opposite the
moon would put apoapsis
right at the moon at that time. However by burning at 127 degrees we
allow our approach to lead the way giving the travel time of
three days. Much like a football quarter
back would lead his receiver.
Instrument Method
With
this method you lunch into LEO or just start from Mir like we did
above. Align planes with the moon as
usual. Only this time we will use the
Transfer MFD to do the calculations for us. This way we are not
depending
on predetermined numbers so we can start
from any orbit altitude we want. The Transfer MFD will tell us when to
start our burn and when to stop. The numbers we used above are not
needed.
To
start bring up the Transfer MFD [Shift][X] and set the Moon as your
Target [Shift][T]. If you want you can
open the Map MFD as well so you can see
where the moons location is relative to you. Now activate the HTO mode
[Shift][X] of the Transfer MFD.
Now
set up an "Intersect" with the moon. In HTO mode you can
"hypothetically" increase your orbit by increasing
Dv [Shift][=] until the "No Intersect"
message disappears. You will see the dashed green "hypothetically" orbit
stretch out towards the lunar orbit and
intersect it. You then rotate the Intersection Indicator, gray line
[Shift][ ,
] and [Shift][ .], until it aligns with
the dashed yellow "Target at Intersection" line. This will tell us where
the
moon is going to be at the time of
arrival. You may notice as you rotate around that you may need to
increase Dv again to keep an intersect.
Like always you are within one orbit from burn time. The two important display items are Dv and DTE.
Dte - is the countdown clock for the next burn time
Dv - is the countdown for when to stop the burn once its begun
Dv - is the countdown for when to stop the burn once its begun
That's
all there is to it. You watch Dte until it counts down to zero and then
start burning prograde. You can
actually begin the burn up to 100
seconds ahead of time if you like. Once the burn begins watch Dv
counting
down so as to be prepare to manually
shut down engines when Dv equals zero. Before Dv gets to zero back off
the thrust so you can nail Dv at zero the best you can. Also you can
cheat and use retro-thrust after the
fact……but don't tell anybody you did
this.
You are now on your way to the Moon. Enjoy your flight.
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