Engineering math professor at @Virginia_Tech. Dynamics and transport, from spacecraft trajectories to airborne agricultural pathogens.
Virginia
Joined July 2015
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What if a spacecraft could cycle between Earth and Moon orbits, performing multiple circuits of each, naturally and indefinitely, with zero propulsion?
We’ve discovered a new class of stable, prograde, low-energy cycler orbits that do just that.
Why these orbits matter:
Ballistic → fuel-free
Stable → long-term ready
Near-chaotic → agile with low ΔV
Low-energy → access to Earth/Moon, Lagrange points, Sun–Earth L1/L2, even heliocentric space
At the AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference in Boston next week, I’ll present on a new family of ballistic Earth-Moon cycler orbits that are stable, prograde, and mission agile—unlike any cyclers in the current literature.
The example below is shown in both the Earth-Moon rotating frame and inertial frame.
Conference Paper: ross.aoe.vt.edu/papers/ross-…
The two sides of my research are talking to each other now
USDA 🤝 @NASA
@SecRollins and @NASAAdmin Isaacman today signed a Memorandum of Understanding to strengthen USDA’s data quality and ensure that American farmers and ranchers benefit from cutting-edge technologies.
We’re delivering better agricultural insights, stronger tools, and advanced tech by cooperating on:
🛰️ Mission & data alignment
💻 Data access & infrastructure
📊 Methodology & validation
Details: usda.gov/about-usda/news/pre…
Shane Ross retweeted
increasingly concerned that ai is revealing the mathematical world as negatively curved. instead of everyone wandering about in idea-space and clustering around the same famous conjectures (local positive curvature), ai is pushing out the boundaries rapidly and revealing that the space of mathematical ideas is ~hyperbolic (negative curvature). though this means there's lots left to discover, it also means that small separations between people/agents will lead to wandering alone.
we may be emerging into an idea-space where there's so much to see and do but everyone is alone in a private heaven, unable to share their subtle joys with others...
3D Earth-Moon cyclers in the real ephemeris with stationkeeping of about 6 m/s per month.
Found a linearly stable near-polar Earth-Moon cycler (CR3BP). Every 51.7 days it passes 8,500 km over the lunar south pole. Flown in DE440 with navigation and burn errors, it stays on track for a median 6.4 m/s/mo of delta-v. @RossDynamicsLab thought you'd enjoy this
Rocket pioneer Krafft Ehricke:
"If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, He would have given man a Moon"
Of the major moons, only ours is heavy and distant enough for its manifolds to join the interplanetary highway
A lunar anthropic principle, from 4-body dynamics
This video was presented at the NASA-USGS Offworld Resources Workshop. Every curve in it is a computed trajectory, not an artist’s sketch.
1: Asteroid material arrives at the Rim, about 1.5 million km out, on natural paths into orbits around Sun-Earth L1 and L2.
2: From the Rim, refined material coasts to the Moon on gravity alone (~40 days) and is captured.
3: A few m/s burn puts it on an Earth-Moon cycler, which drops packages onto other orbits along its route.
The Earth-Moon system is threaded with natural routes like these. Find the right ones, and moving material around cislunar space costs tens of meters per second, not kilometers per second.
Ehricke's original reasoning was about lower gravity, oxygen/resources, & surface conditions as a first step outward.
The manifolds finding is a later celestial mechanics result he wouldn't have known, but confirms the Moon as uniquely well placed for low cost material movement
This video was presented at the NASA-USGS Offworld Resources Workshop. Every curve in it is a computed trajectory, not an artist’s sketch.
1: Asteroid material arrives at the Rim, about 1.5 million km out, on natural paths into orbits around Sun-Earth L1 and L2.
2: From the Rim, refined material coasts to the Moon on gravity alone (~40 days) and is captured.
3: A few m/s burn puts it on an Earth-Moon cycler, which drops packages onto other orbits along its route.
The Earth-Moon system is threaded with natural routes like these. Find the right ones, and moving material around cislunar space costs tens of meters per second, not kilometers per second.
Cycler and network orbits from my student Abdullah Braik’s PhD work.
Video: youtu.be/c_QzloeHTmk
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2605.31543
Nice to see the Earth-Moon cycler orbits our lab recently discovered featured in @GarretsonPeter's overview of the cislunar space economy. Lots of interesting possibilities for transportation, surveillance, and infrastructure.
This is a fantastic video explaining orbital dynamics and the resulting economics, and security considerations of cislunar space. Well worth the 8.5 minutes to watch. youtu.be/kdpOdSMzXTA?is=By6z…
More on the stable Earth–Moon cycler orbits:
2025: Original discovery and applications
ross.aoe.vt.edu/papers/ross-…
2026: Underlying physics
arxiv.org/abs/2606.29189
Video: youtu.be/CgJE2hyC-mw
Listen to the point at the end: it's beyond mathematics.
Much of science, not just current science, but the planned scientific programs for a decade are being fed into the frontier models.
So a few companies know what scientists intend to do and where science is going.
Thinking of the air traffic density when most commuters are airborne traveling 100 miles at 250 mph.
Shane Ross retweeted
The 2027 SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems (#SIAMDS27) has just posted its list of fantastic invited speakers: siam.org/conferences-events/…
This is the so-called "Snowbird Conference" (no matter where it's located) and is our home conference.
