A complete and fast survey of the orbital insertion design space for planetary moon missions

Abstract

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.