Astronomers just discovered a "hidden route" to the moon after running hundreds of thousands of simulations

I'm not an astronaut. NASA has never asked me to be a part of Mission Control. I'm no expert. I fully admit all of this!

So I guess it's unsurprising that I thought there was only, you know, one way to the moon, namely: You go to the moon and then you come back.

Like, Earth ---> Moon, then Moon ---> Earth.

I kinda figured that was all there was to it!

But apparently, as Space.com reports, it's a little more complicated than that:

A lot of time and effort goes into planning routes for space missions. Researchers look for the most efficient path between planets and moons because spaceflight is expensive. Even small gains in efficiency can save millions.

An international team of researchers say they've found a method of calculating a more efficient route between Earth and the moon using advanced computer modeling.

Again, I pretty much assumed that there was just one route for lunar travel:

Yet it's not so simple. As Space.com notes, "spacecraft that journey through our solar system only use fuel only part of the time," with gravity generally being the "preferred method" due to its being, you know, free.

As a result, "finding a cheap route to the moon has a lot to do with gravity." Everyone is familiar with the old slingshot maneuver to help get a boost in space travel, of course. But the researchers dicovered that "instead of using the branch of the lunar-orbit variate closest to Earth, it's better to enter that variate from the opposite side."

I'm not quite sure what that means, though written out in visual academic-ese it looks something like this:

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The resulting savings is significant:

Essentially, the team found that free gravity-based propulsion is more plentiful when taking the hidden path. This newly reported route uses 58.80 meters per second (m/s) less fuel consumption than the previous cheapest known route. Again, even this little efficiency gain would help reduce the cost of traveling to the moon.

You can read the full scientific article here.

Those rockets need to save all the fuel they can — there are no Exxons on the moon.