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A comment on NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Awakens for Pluto Encounter. Parent comment

Re:NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Awakens for Pluto Encounter by m_mueller on Monday December 08, 2014 @05:16PM (#8719588)
That's what I meant with eccentric path though: As far as I know Pluto is not always that far out, there are points in time where it's closer to the sun than Neptune - which should be a good moment when either Uranus or Neptune could be used to aerobreak.

Edit: but only when they also line up correctly, which is why I think it would take hundreds of years of waiting.

Edit2: After watching the linked video, Uranus would be out, since Pluto is never close to it, but Neptune might work at some point in time when these planets are close.

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Re:NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Awakens for Pluto Encounter by dredmorbius on Monday December 08, 2014 @08:47PM (#8720454)
The Neptune-Pluto alignment is one that might be interesting to explore on a solar system simulator. I suspect you might have to wait a fair fraction of a thousand years for that though, at a minimum.
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Re:NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Awakens for Pluto Encounter by m_mueller on Monday December 08, 2014 @08:57PM (#8720493)
I actually tried to find a good simulator for that reason, but all the web simulators I've found didn't have a reasonable time slider UI.
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Re:NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Awakens for Pluto Encounter by dredmorbius on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @12:42AM (#8721244)
There's a KDE astronomy simulator I've used that seems pretty good, though I haven't played with it for a while. Celestia IIRC: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/celestia-astronomy-linux-progr...
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