Design of a Mission to Titan

Evan Gawlick, June 27, 2008

The aim of this project is to assist in the design of a fuel-efficient trajectory to be utilized by NASA's Titan-bound spacecraft during its tour of the Saturnian moon system. We intend to design one or more low-fuel Saturnian moon tours, specifically targeting the moons Titan and Enceladus, that exploit the natural dynamics of three-body problem, a classic problem from celestial mechanics. The design of such trajectories will involve two main tasks: computing invariant manifolds (structures in the phase space of the three-body problem associated with periodic orbits and equilibrium points) for the Saturn-Titan-spacecraft and Saturn-Enceladus-spacecraft three-body systems, and optimizing trajectories that take advantage of these structures. Trajectory optimization will entail the use of the DMOC optimization package.

In the forthcoming days, I plan to implement invariant manifold computation and trajectory optimization for a well-studied problem in trajectory design: the design of a fuel-efficient trajectory from the Earth to the Moon. Comparison with a well-studied example problem should offer a convenient arena to test my code and familiarize myself with the fine points of our trajectory design strategy. I also plan to determine whether DMOC primitives could be of use for the optimization portion of this project.

Surf Progress Report

Presentation, Aug 8, 2008