Abstract. This seminar presents new technologies for Space Mission Design, recently used by three international space agencies (NASA, Europe's ESA, and Japan's JAXA). The technologies enabled several key Solar System missions: the BepiColombo mission to Mercury, the Enceladus orbiter and the recovery of the Akastuki mission to Venus. We will also present the T-P graph, a new approach to designing a new qualitative category of cost-effective trajectories.
Space exploration has become more ambitious, and the costs and risks of many important missions have grown to the point that they cannot be easily supported under the expected budgetary situations. These new types of methods will allow Space Mission Design to have much greater leveraging power to reduce the net costs and risks and allow many more missions to be undertaken successfully. “The history of planetary exploration is replete with examples […] of missions enabled by advanced trajectory analysis” (Planetary Science Decadal Survey, 2011).
In the last decade, space exploration has provided us a tremendous amount of new discoveries: methane rains on Titan creating rivers and lakes similar to Earth’s; Enceladus plums of water vapor; large ice deposits on Mars and hints of a warmer past that could have harbored life; samples from an asteroid, a comet’s coma and the solar wind were returned to Earth to study the origin and composition of the Sun and our Solar system. With these new methods, many new types of missions will be enabled that could not otherwise be undertaken, by radically improving the chances for success, and reducing the net risks and costs.
Bio. Dr. Campagnola is a researcher and mission designer in the Department of Space Flight Systems at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). He has worked previously at ESA and JPL. His PhD is from USC. His research interests include non-linear dynamical systems, optimal control, optimization methods, mission design, astrodynamics, and numerical methods.