Periapsis

Like Annie says, "If you don't have a metaphor, you ain't got shit."

This is all about orbits and arcs.
Hand drawn orbits so they're not perfect.  Hand rasped and planed so there are minute variations in the surfaces.  You can feel them more than you can see them.

Over a Negroni, walking to a movie, between songs in Cary's tiny kitchen, watching the Coca Cola sign flashing on and off outside; John's been giving me updates on his moon missions.  The current one, LADEE, is about ready to crash into the moon.  These are years of updates and conversations, questions answers and more questions because it takes years of planning, building, testing, blasting off, flight control and ending of a NASA mission.

It's John's job to write the commands to control the ship.  Instructions come in from the Flight Dynamics Team and John figures out how to do it.  The ship's orbits are constantly being fussed with, they're all hand done, not perfect.  There are minute variations in them that you can feel more than you can see.  The ship arcs across the darkened universe, gets slingshotted around celestial bodies.  There's a periapsis at play here....where my orbits comes closest to the celestial bodies on the table top and off they go to come back round again.

John says on his current mission the periapsis of the ship is most important.  The periapsis is that point on the orbit that comes closest to the body it's revolving around.  And to further that, it's also important that the periapsis of LADEE coincides with the moon's sunrise terminator.  You'll have to ask John more about that yourself...bit out of my pay range for an explanation.

The client for this table had one instruction. "Don't make it square."  I didn't.

More pics here and even bigger pics here