Notable Research

The porkchop plot is the porkchop-shaped, computer-generated contour plot that displays the launch date and arrival date characteristics of an interplanetary flight path for a given launch opportunity between two celestial bodies. We found that an interplanetary transfer trajectory, the classical porkchop plot, cannot give enough information for the interplanetary mission. In this regard, I have generalized the classical porkchop plot into the 3D porkchop plot that gives the launch, flyby, and arrival opportunity of the interplanetary mission. This paper presents an alternative opportunity for the Psyche asteroid mission with Mars’s gravity assist. Psyche is the largest M-type asteroid in the solar system and may be a good source of Platinum group metals. This paper also presents the analytical solution of the gravity assist model, which is useful for obtaining the optimal flyby radius and the optimal thrust impulse during the planetary gravity assist.

NASA's Psyche mission will launch in August 2022 and begin a journey of 3.6 years to the metallic asteroid Psyche, where it will orbit and examine this unique body. This paper presents an alternative opportunity of the Psyche mission as well as the return opportunity to the Earth. It uses Mars's gravity to rendezvous with and orbit the largest metal asteroid in the solar system. The spacecraft orbits around Psyche for approximately 1710 solar days, then starts its return journey. In the outer layer of the proposed methodology, the differential evolution algorithm is used to find the optimal launch, flyby, and arrival date. In the inner layer, Lambert's algorithm is used for finding the feasible and optimal space trajectories solution. Considering gravity assists, before the gravity assists impulse, an optimal thrust impulse has been calculated at the periapsis of the fly-by planet that gives the maximum ∆ν2 to the spacecraft.

In this work, an optimization problem related to a non-linear function is tackled mathematically by the use of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) method in the case of a circular restricted three-body problem (CRTBP). This method is applied to find the family of periodic orbits around the collinear Lagrangian points and in the Sun-Earth system. To deal with the chosen like Sun–Earth-spacecraft system, which is constructed as CRTBP problem, the Lagrangian points associated with this system are located by the application of the Newton–Raphson method. Moreover, the initial conditions for the periodic orbit of the dynamical system are determined with the same proposed method. The application of the PSO method to this problem is motivated by its higher numerical accuracy.

In this research, a new methodology named as LPG-Algorithm is designed to determine the transfer trajectory between two celestial bodies or any two locales in space. It is constructed by combining Lambert's problem with the genetic algorithm (GA). In this algorithm, the initial state of the transfer trajectory has been optimized with the help of GA, which is already attained by solving Lambert's problem. We have successfully applied this algorithm to obtain the transfer trajectory of a spacecraft from the Low Earth orbit (LEO) to some desired asteroid within a time frame. For this purpose, 8 Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) have been selected. These are likely assets to help space industrialization, as they have the earmarks of being the least affordable source of certain required crude materials like valuable metals and semiconducting elements. The convergence of the genetic algorithm to the optimal initial state of the transfer trajectory is also shown in this research.