Adam Hibberd
I was recently asked by a US colleague to do a little research using 'OITS'.
For those of you unaware by now, 'OITS' stands for 'Optimum Interplanetary Trajectory Software' and is a powerful tool I developed single-handedly for studying the problem of sending spacecraft on heliocentric trajectories to a planet or for that matter any other celestial body in our Solar System.
What makes it so powerful is that it can accommodate multiple gravitational assists (GAs) on the way which can result in a lower propellant mass needed by the spacecraft to get to the target in question. This mass is a very important metric in determining the feasibility of a mission, since as you probably know, mass must be driven down to as low as possible, since mass-to-orbit has a significant launch cost.
Anyway my colleague suggested I do some analysis into the feasibility of missions to a selection of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) which will come very close to Earth in the near future.
The requirement for OITS would be to minimize this propellant mass for the launch vehicle (actually minimize V∞) but with a further constraint imposed - that of arriving at the target NEO with a relative arrival velocity less than <= 300 m/s.
Would my software be up to this task?
It turns out yes! And you can find below a selection of successful 'matches' which comply with these requirements. The reader may note that some of these can be rejected due to being too challenging for any launcher, but note I have NOT included all solutions found by my software - this is not an exhaustive list.
