Simple way to not waste fuel on Jupiter.

[lashlbhat]

Jupiter needs a lot of delta v to get into a stable orbit around it, right? Well, most people do it wrong.
Also, some people wonder why they are are already out of fuel just when they reached Jupiter orbit.
So how do we counter this?

There are two ways that you can do this.

1. Higher orbit. (imo practical option)
If you burn towards Jupiter and get into an orbit that's in between Ganymede and Europa, you don't need to burn a lot of fuel.
If you want to get close to Io and Europa without accelerating at speeds like ~2000 m/s, you can take advantage of a Ganymede gravity assist.
This works by getting Slingshot by Ganymede to slow you down. Also, the delta V required to get an encounter with Ganymede is very low here.
I got literally -141 m/s of delta v, just to slow down.
However, for this mission, I was aiming to land on Ganymede, But, my entry into Ganymede was extremely curved. This is how you know that you don't need
that much delta V. Matter of fact, I used only ~200 m/s of delta v to get into orbit.
Here's some screenshots if you're confused.

Now, Second way.

2. Aerobraking

This way required you to put your periapsis of Jupiter at around 94 km.
This is not that helpful, as it only slows you down a bit, and even at 94 km you will be accelerating at 13 km/s, which means its gonna get real toasty!
If you slapped a lot of heat shields on, this could be more practical, but imo the Ganymede gravity assist which leads you into the inner Jovian system is better than this way.

I was too lazy to aerobrake so I don't have screenshots lol

 

[lashlbhat]

P.S, rover landing successful yay!

 

[Catalyst_Kh]

Option №1 still requires some fuel burning to not be thrown away from Jupiter's SOI, so it would be much more beneficial to stage 2-3 gravity assists in one line, from 2-3 different moons, to slow down enough to remain in SOI without much fuel burning, then you can slowdown more on your next circles.

Option №2 can give much more slowdown if player will take foldable huge aerobraker and unfold it before Jupiter, then it might not even require burning fuel at all, since much more slowdown from aerobraking might be enough on its own to keep ship in SOI for next circle, and then new airobrakings and gravity assists may be used to shift orbit to anything else almost for free.