Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (72)
- Conference Proceeding (53)
- Part of a Book (9)
- Other (1)
- Report (1)
Has Fulltext
- no (136) (remove)
Keywords
- solar sail (5)
- GOSSAMER-1 (3)
- MASCOT (3)
- Mars (2)
- Solar sail (2)
- Spacecraft (2)
- Trajectory Optimization (2)
- multiple NEA rendezvous (2)
- small spacecraft (2)
- Analogue Environments (1)
- Antarctic Glaciology (1)
- Antarctica (1)
- Asteroid Deflection (1)
- Attitude dynamics (1)
- Automated Optimization (1)
- Cryobot (1)
- DLR-ESTEC GOSSAMER roadmap for solar sailing (1)
- Evolutionary Neurocontrol (1)
- Extraterrestrial Glaciology (1)
- Glaciological instruments and methods (1)
The scientific interest for near-Earth asteroids as well as the interest in potentially hazardous asteroids from the perspective of planetary defense led the space community to focus on near-Earth asteroid mission studies. A multiple near-Earth asteroid rendezvous mission with close-up observations of several objects can help to improve the characterization of these asteroids. This work explores the design of a solar-sail spacecraft for such a mission, focusing on the search of possible sequences of encounters and the trajectory optimization. This is done in two sequential steps: a sequence search by means of a simplified trajectory model and a set of heuristic rules based on astrodynamics, and a subsequent optimization phase. A shape-based approach for solar sailing has been developed and is used for the first phase. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through a fully optimized multiple near-Earth asteroid rendezvous mission. The results show that it is possible to visit five near-Earth asteroids within 10 years with near-term solar-sail technology.