Optimal Launch Opportunity Searching for Small Celestial Body
- Paper number
IAC-06-C1.4.08
- Author
Dr. Ren Yuan, Harbin Institute of Technology, China
- Coauthor
Mr. Pingyuan Cui, Harbin Institute of Technology, China
- Year
2006
- Abstract
A novel method was investigated for searching optimal launch opportunity based on analytical gradients of the total velocity increment for the exploration with respect to launch time and arrive time. This method overcame the drawbacks of the conventional pork-chop plots method which was widely used in launch opportunity searching problems of small celestial body. By utilizing the new method, the computation time was greatly cut short and the searching precision of the launch window could be increased easily with very low cost. At end of this paper, taking the Ceres asteroid as an example, the effectivity of the method was proved by searching the launch opportunity to Ceres asteroid during a specified time range. The numerical results showed that it is a time economization way to searching launch opportunity for small bodys. The method was also fit for exploration missions with one or more planet swingbys.
- Abstract document