Point and Shoot
The history of human exploration has always been tied to the search for a destination. Space travel is no different: The Apollo program, which ferried humans to the moon, was not only a scientific and technical achievement, but also an exercise in planting flags and leaving bootprints. Yet proposals are now brewing to launch missions to empty dots in the vastness of space, albeit ones with very special properties.
Take any planet in orbit around a star, or any moon that spins around a planet. In each of these systems there will be five spots, arranged in a geometrical configuration that resembles the points of an archer’s drawn bow, where the combined gravitational fields and centrifugal force of the bodies’ rotation cancel out. These are zones of hidden equilibrium, gravitational lacunae amid the ceaseless movement of celestial bodies. The niches are known as Lagrange (or Lagrangian) points, named after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, the French-Italian mathematician whose 1772 essay identified two such locations in the Earth-sun system.
If a satellite or an asteroid at just the right energy finds its way into the zone around a Lagrange point, it will stay stationary relative to the other two bodies as
