Browsing by Subject "V-infinity leveraging maneuver"

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A complete and fast survey of the orbital insertion design space for planetary moon missions
(2017-08-10) See, Robert Harding; Russell, Ryan Paul, 1976-
The most expensive maneuver for an interplanetary spacecraft is the orbital injection. One approach to find minimum fuel-cost trajectories is to preform a search over a number of design parameters such as radius of periapse, apoapse of the insertion orbit, and angle of approach. The so-called V-infinity leveraging maneuver has been shown to reduce the design space by implementing a small burn at apoapse to modify the velocity vector at a flyby body. The focus of the present work is orbital insertion of a science mission at Jupiter or Saturn, with the end goal of rendezvousing with a high-science priority moon such at Titan or Europa. The orbital insertion phase is framed as a boundary-value problem with a 1-D minimization over Time-Of-Flight (TOF) and assumes two body dynamics which enables both rapid and broad trajectory searches. Specifically, a search over Body-Plane (B-Plane) Angle and TOF is presented and then, upon finding a minimum-[Delta] V B-Plane Angle, searches over radius of periapse. Additionally, analytic solutions for B-Plane Angle are derived for the special cases of minimum inclination, node/apse alignment, and moon/apse alignment.