Orbital Design for Multiple Flyby Missions

Abstract

This paper presents a procedure to design multiple flyby missions. When the missions to observe space debris or near Earth asteroid (NEA) are considered, it is more efficient to achieve many observations by a single spacecraft during the flight. Using the generating functions of canonical system, two-point boundary-value problem can be solved by function evaluation. This enables us to choose among a long list of targets with known paths those which can be attained with minimum fuel consumption. Using this property of generating functions approach, a strategy to optimize the multiple flyby sequence is proposed. This paper focuses on the selection of sequence with pre-fixed interval time where the total amount of velocity change is described by analytical function of positions of targets corresponding to the impulse time. The illustrated example using Hill two-body problem is shown.