Outer space is massive, and throughout the universe, everything is in motion. The Earth orbits around the Sun, the Moon orbits around the Earth, the Sun orbits around the center of the Milky Way, and so on.

To make things even more complicated, objects don’t just orbit perfectly around a single thing. For example, while the Moon does orbit around the Earth, it is also pulled by the Sun, changing its motion in slight ways. To a lesser extent, it is also influenced by other large objects, including Jupiter and other planets.

Simply put, gravity makes the whole universe move in ways that may seem crazy at first, but once it is better understood, it is very orderly.

Once you understand these factors well enough, opportunities seem to arise. One example of this is finding Lagrange points in space.

Lagrange points are spots in space where the gravity of multiple objects basically cancels each other out from the point of view of one of those objects. This is, of course, an imprecise definition since the gravity isn’t actually canceled, but it makes it easy to understand.

One Lagrange point exists approximately 1% the distance between the Earth and the Sun, which is about 1.5 million kilometers from the core of the Earth. Objects at this point are pulled on by both the Sun and the Earth, resulting in the object not moving in either direction.

As long as the object in the location is small enough so that it doesn’t have much of a gravitational pull of its own, it will remain in that location (relative to Earth) for a very long time. There are five instruments placed at this point, called L1, primarily used to study the Sun.

Another Lagrange point, L2, is located on the opposite side of the Earth, in line with the Sun. While it would seem like having both the Earth and the Sun on the same side would make the gravity stronger and pull it in faster.

This is half right. The gravity is indeed stronger, but that simply pulls any objects in this spot along, working against the centrifugal forces that are in place from it traveling around the Sun.

The James Webb Space Telescope was placed near the L2 point to take advantage of this. While it isn’t exactly in the L2 location, it is close enough so that it drifts out of position very slowly, only requiring corrective maneuvers rarely, meaning it can operate with very little fuel consumption.

There are many other Lagrange points in the universe, with most planets having them. Jupiter has two known Lagrange points, with NASA working on a mission to study an asteroid caught in one of them. There is even a Lagrange point between the Earth and the Moon, which some experts suggest would be an ideal location to build a space base or massive spacecraft.

Overall, Lagrange points are very interesting and have a lot of potential uses when it comes to space exploration.

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