You are out on a date, eating dinner in a restaurant that has several television screens. Most of the screens are showing sports events, but one near you and your date is showing a discussion of an upcoming voyage to Mars. (a) Your date says, "I wonder how long it takes to get to Mars?” Wanting to impress your date, you grab a napkin and draw Figure P13.9 on it. Even more impressively, you tell your date that the minimum-energy transfer orbit from Earth to Mars is an elliptical trajectory with the departure planet corresponding to the perihelion of the ellipse and the arrival planet at the aphelion. You pull out your smartphone, activate the calculator feature, and perform a calculation on another napkin to answer the question above that your date asked about the transfer time interval to Mars on this particular trajectory. (b) What If? Your date is impressed, but then asks you to determine the transit time to an inner planet, like Venus.
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