Historical Origins of The Method
In his paper “Тем кто будет читать, чтобы строить” (To whoever will read in order to build ), published in 1938 but dated 1918–1919, Yuri Kondratyuk suggested that a spacecraft traveling between two planets could be accelerated at the beginning of its trajectory and decelerated at the end of its trajectory by using the gravity of the two planets' moons. In his 1925 paper "Проблема полета при помощи реактивных аппаратов: межпланетные полеты", Friedrich Zander made a similar argument.
However, neither investigator realized that gravitational assists from planets along a spacecraft’s trajectory could propel a spacecraft and that therefore such assists could greatly reduce the amount of propellant required to travel among the planets. That discovery was made by Michael Minovitch in 1961.
The gravity assist maneuver was first used in 1959 when the Soviet probe Luna 3 photographed the far side of Earth's Moon. The maneuver relied on research performed at the Department of Applied Mathematics of Steklov Institute.
Read more about this topic: Gravity Assist
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