TY  - CHAP
A1  - Peloni, Alessandro
A1  - Dachwald, Bernd
A1  - Ceriotti, Matteo
T1  - Multiple NEA rendezvous mission: Solar sailing options
T2  - Fourth International Symposium on Solar Sailing
N2  - The scientific interest in near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and the classification of some of those as potentially hazardous asteroid for the Earth stipulated the interest in NEA exploration. Close-up observations of these objects will increase drastically our knowledge about the overall NEA population. For this reason, a multiple NEA rendezvous mission through solar sailing is investigated, taking advantage of the propellantless nature of this groundbreaking propulsion technology. Considering a spacecraft based on the DLR/ESA Gossamer technology, this work focuses on the search of possible sequences of NEA encounters. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through a number of fully-optimized trajectories. The results show that it is possible to visit five NEAs within 10 years with near-term solar-sail technology. Moreover, a study on a reduced NEA database demonstrates the reliability of the approach used, showing that 58% of the sequences found with an approximated trajectory model can be converted into real solar-sail trajectories. Lastly, this second study shows the effectiveness of the proposed automatic optimization algorithm, which is able to find solutions for a large number of mission scenarios without any input required from the user.
KW  - Multiphase
KW  - Trajectory Optimization
KW  - Automated Optimization
KW  - Gossamer
KW  - Sequence-Search
Y1  - 2017
N1  - Fourth International Symposium on Solar Sailing (ISSS 2017), Kyoto, Japan, 17-20 Jan 2017.
http://www.jsforum.or.jp/ISSS2017/
SP  - 1
EP  - 11
ER  -