gravity assist

American  

noun

1. the technique of using the energy of a gravitational field and the orbital velocity of a planet to change the speed and trajectory of a spacecraft.

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Example Sentences

After skimming the inner edge of the main asteroid belt, Lucy heads back toward Earth for a gravity assist in December 2024.

From Science Daily • May 29, 2024

It will skim the inner edge of the main asteroid belt before looping back toward Earth for a gravity assist that will fling it out toward the Trojans.

From Los Angeles Times • Oct. 10, 2023

We’ll use a gravity assist from the moon and then the Earth to make the orbital capture.

From Slate • Aug. 5, 2023

When the Voyagers were being built, only one spacecraft had used a gravity assist to reach another planet—the Mariner 10 probe got one from Venus while en route to Mercury.

From Scientific American • Jun. 16, 2022

This enabled the two Voyagers to use a "gravity assist" technique in which the craft were successively flung from one gassy giant to the next in a kind of cosmic version of "crack the whip."

From "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson