Solar system exploration has emerged as a primary focus in the space community, with deep-space CubeSats standing out as a promising solution for studying asteroids within the solar system. This paper specifically addresses missions employing solar sail technology, aiming to explore the attainable reachability of a miniaturized solar sail departing from Earth. This is achieved by considering both flyby and rendezvous missions. Drawing inspiration from previous research using low-thrust propulsion, this work focuses on time-optimal missions, applying optimal control theory to achieve reasonable transfer times. The formulation relies on continuous guidance control, employing an indirect method derived from Euler–Lagrange variational equations and Pontryagin’s minimum principle. Results show that the algorithm is a versatile tool for obtaining optimal solutions for missions involving trajectories with multiple flybys.
Solar Sail Trajectory Optimization for Asteroid Flyby and Rendezvous
2025-05-01
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby Mission
NTIS | 1992
|Comet Encke Flyby Asteroid Rendezvous Mission
AIAA | 1974
|The comet rendezvous asteroid flyby mission
NTRS | 1992
|The Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby project
NTRS | 1985
|