Session
Technical Session VII: Student Scholarship Competition
Abstract
The Canadian Robotic Asteroid Flyby and (Tentatively) Impact project (CRAFTI) proposes to accomplish an interplanetary mission to explore an asteroid while maintaining a budget of ~US$10 million. This cost target implies a launch as a secondary payload and hence a microsatsized spacecraft. The mission objective is to send two spacecraft to encounter the near-Earth asteroid Toutatis in 2008; one of these will fly by Toutatis at close range, while the other impacts the asteroid. An electric propulsion system is being considered to provide the thrust for the orbital manoeuvres. However, the thrust level achievable by this kind of system is very low, requiring long burn times that complicate the orbital analysis. A lowthrust orbit propagator that has been developed to support the CRAFTI mission analysis, and the preliminary trajectory design work that has been carried out, is described in this paper.
Low Thrust Trajectory Design for CRAFTI
The Canadian Robotic Asteroid Flyby and (Tentatively) Impact project (CRAFTI) proposes to accomplish an interplanetary mission to explore an asteroid while maintaining a budget of ~US$10 million. This cost target implies a launch as a secondary payload and hence a microsatsized spacecraft. The mission objective is to send two spacecraft to encounter the near-Earth asteroid Toutatis in 2008; one of these will fly by Toutatis at close range, while the other impacts the asteroid. An electric propulsion system is being considered to provide the thrust for the orbital manoeuvres. However, the thrust level achievable by this kind of system is very low, requiring long burn times that complicate the orbital analysis. A lowthrust orbit propagator that has been developed to support the CRAFTI mission analysis, and the preliminary trajectory design work that has been carried out, is described in this paper.
