THE MEETING

The Three-Body Problem and Space Mission Design

Wednesday, May 24, 2000
Control and Dynamical Systems, Caltech

The purpose of the one day meeting is to discuss contemporary issues concerning the three-body problem and space mission design. Mission design is moving toward a three-body approach, necessary for recent challenging mission concepts, such as the Genesis Discovery Mission and the ballistic lunar capture, for which the traditional two-body "patched-conic" approach fails.

We will present recent results regarding the application of basic tools of dynamical systems to analyze and design new classes of space mission trajectories. Often one starts with the circular restricted three-body problem (CR3BP) as the initial model. Building from knowledge of the phase space structure for the three-body problem, one can then consider larger N-body systems as a set of coupled three-body systems.

Since numerical techniques are essential in tackling such nonlinear problems, we will mention the numerical methods that are indispensible for this new approach, such as the computation of periodic orbits and their invariant manifolds, differential correction and optimal control.
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