Descent Maneuver Planning for a Spacecraft Landing on a Small Body

Details Descent Maneuver Planning for a Spacecraft Landing on a Small Body Descent Maneuver Planning for a Spacecraft Landing on a Small Body

Jan 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002iaf..confe.722s&link_type=abstract

IAF abstracts, 34th COSPAR Scientific Assembly, The Second World Space Congress, held 10-19 October, 2002 in Houston, TX, USA.,

Computer Science

Scientific paper

This paper is concerned with the problems of descent maneuver planning for a spacecraft to land on the surface of a small body. Exploration of a small body in the solar system will be one of the important aspects of deep space mission in the future. These missions are planned to send a spacecraft to an asteroid or a comet, to rendezvous and explore its features, and to land on the surface and take samples. Because of the uncertainty of the small body's primary information (include its shape, mass, density, composition, rotational dynamics and distributing of gravity field, etc.), the landing operations is very difficult. To ensure the health and safety of the spacecraft and achieve the desired end state to a high degree of accuracy, one of the landing modes is that the spacecraft will be guided through a series of predetermined waypoints down to the surface of a small body. This paper refers to a method of descent maneuver planning by means of a genetic algorithm. A sequence of descent maneuver is optimized based on minimum fuel consuming under several constraints, such as the normal to an orbit plane must not be too close to the direction from spacecraft to Earth in order to preserve a Doppler radiometric ground-based measurement, etc. In addition, the motion of the small body, a target of deep space mission, is to be regarded as spinning and nutation, and the anomalous distributing of gravity field of the small body is considered in this paper. The results of simulation show that the use of a genetic algorithm can provide a very satisfactory solution. Key Words: Descent Maneuver Planning, Genetic Algorithm, Landing, Spacecraft, Small Body

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