Flying the Kirkwood Gaps.

[Siliconaut]

I was reading about the asteroid belt recently and learned about the concept of the Kirkwood Gaps. These are orbits within the asteroid belt that have been swept relatively clean of asteroids due to resonances with Jupiter, which perturb the asteroids that chance across these orbits into new, random orbits with either higher or lower semi major axes. Now I would like to take DG or whatever and put it into one of these orbits, kick up the TC and monitor the instruments and record the slight fluctuations that occur whenever Jupiter gets near, find out just how much each pass perturb the orbit in SMa and Inc and Ecc. Now would a DG be a good test platform for this experiment or should I use something more massive, like one of the little vessel asteroids of which I have a couple. Gravity does some really amazing things over large distances and time scales, I really like that orbiter has the fidelity to model such weak forces over the scale of the solar system.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

A DG should be totally fine. After all, you're measuring the forces imposed on a body by Jupiter, not the forces a body imposes on Jupiter.

 

[brainandforce]

Another thing you could do is fly the gaps in Saturn's rings - there are similar areas swept clean by resonances. You'd have much smaller timescales (a few minutes with time acceleration) but depending which resonance you fly the forces might be considerably different.