Open Access

Horst Wolfgang Loeb, Karl-Heinz Schartner, Bernd Dachwald, Wolfgang Seboldt

• By DLR-contact, sample return missions to the large main-belt asteroid “19, Fortuna” have been studied. The mission scenario has been based on three ion thrusters of the RIT-22 model, which is presently under space qualification, and on solar arrays equipped with triple-junction GaAs solar cells. After having designed the spacecraft, the orbit-to-orbit trajectories for both, a one-way SEP mission with a chemical sample return and an all-SEP return mission, have been optimized using a combination of artificial neural networks with evolutionary algorithms. Additionally, body-to-body trajectories have been investigated within a launch period between 2012 and 2015. For orbit-to-orbit calculation, the launch masses of the hybrid mission and of the all-SEP mission resulted in 2.05 tons and 1.56 tons, respectively, including a scientific payload of 246 kg. For the related transfer durations 4.14 yrs and 4.62 yrs were obtained. Finally, a comparison between the mission scenarios based on SEP and on NEP have been carried out favouring clearly SEP.