Models and methods for GTOC2: Analysis of a multiple asteroid rendezvous mission

Models and methods for GTOC2: Analysis of a multiple asteroid rendezvous mission

Gorter, H.P.D.

Ambrosius, B.A.C. (mentor)

Aerospace Engineering

Space Engineering

Astrodynamics & Space missions

2010-03-12

The Global Trajectory Optimization Competition (GTOC) is a competition that seeks to stimulate improvements in the fields of mission analysis and optimization. This research focuses on the problem posed in the second version of the competition, GTOC2. The problem concerns an asteroid tour mission, where the asteroids are subdivided into 4 groups, and one asteroid from each group needs to be visited. Minimization of final mass over time of flight is sought. Previous attempts of the Mission Analysis Department at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering to solve this problem using conventional methods were unsuccessful. The goal of this research is to investigate alternative methods to model and solve the GTOC2 problem. The assignment has been divided into three consecutive parts. The first part concerns the asteroid selection and sequencing, the second part assesses the phasing characteristics of the selected sequences and the last part concerns the exact trajectory determination. For the asteroids selection and sequencing two methods will be investigated, being the Nearest Neighbor Heuristic and the Branch- and Bound Method. Both methods will be applied to three different search spaces. For the second part, an orbit model based on exponential sinusoids will be developed. Each part of the trajectory between two different bodies will be modeled by an individual exponential sinusoid. Unfortunately, the timeframe of this research and the quality of the results of the second step did not permit an analysis of the third part of the assignment. Nevertheless, an advice can be formulated for future analysis of the GTOC2 problem. Although the best results are obtained by the Nearest Neighbor Heuristic, results also indicate that an improved Branch- and Bound Method will most likely provide better results. The continuous solution method, based on exponential sinusoids, proved to be unable to perform an accurate phasing assessment of a given asteroid sequence.

Trajectory
GTOC
Asteroids

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:22a5b4f6-70d1-4835-8f23-3cd6aa10bf92

2011-04-05

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2010 Gorter, H.P.D.