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- IfB - Institut für Bioengineering (70) (remove)
There is common agreement within the scientific community that in order to understand our local galactic environment it will be necessary to send a spacecraft into the region beyond the solar wind termination shock. Considering distances of 200 AU for a new mission, one needs a spacecraft traveling at a speed of close to 10 AU/yr in order to keep the mission duration in the range of less than 25 yrs, a transfer time postulated by European Space Agency (ESA). Two propulsion options for the mission have been proposed and discussed so far: the solar sail propulsion and the ballistic/radioisotope-electric propulsion (REP). As a further alternative, we here investigate a combination of solar-electric propulsion (SEP) and REP. The SEP stage consists of six 22-cms diameter RIT-22 ion thrusters working with a high specific impulse of 7377 s corresponding to a positive grid voltage of 5 kV. Solar power of 53 kW at begin of mission (BOM) is provided by a lightweight solar array.
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.