Optimal space trajectories

Stefano Campagnola, PhD candidate, USC

ABSTRACT: The optimization of space trajectories can save millions of dollars in launch costs. Their design affects all the other spacecraft subsystems, including power, telecommunication, attitude determination and control, etc. For this reason, mission planning engineers have to provide the mission team with a large variety of optimal trajectories, satisfying the mission constraints.
      
Optimal trajectories are typically computed with two different approaches. Indirect methods implement the necessary conditions of the Pontryagin maximum principle in what is called the "primer vector theory". Direct methods implement a numerical transcription of the problem and solve a large, sparse parameter optimization. Both methods find a local optimum of the original problem, so in general one needs some heuristic method combined with global optimization algorithm to find a first guess.      
      
Bio: Stefano Campagnola obtained a MS in 2002 from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, with a thesis on optimal trajectories to the Jupiter moon Europa. He moved to the European Space Agency to design and  
optimize interplanetary trajectories to Mercury, to the Sun, and to the Jupiter system. In 2005 he moved to LA to work at JPL on trajectories to the Moon, and in 2006 he started a Ph.D. with prof. Newton at USC. He will defend his thesis on March 8, 2010. The title of the thesis is "New techniques in astrodynamics for missions to the moon systems".
Web: http://www.missionanalysis.org/campagnola/