Electric propulsion is an enabling technology for NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission that affords an order of magnitude reduction in fuel. Unfortunately, elec- tric propulsion’s low-thrust capabilities require long thrusting arcs that make space- craft susceptible to disturbances resulting in missed thrust events. One method for designing trajectories resilient to such missed thrust events is expected thrust frac- tion, which embeds their stochastic nature into a time-varying duty cycle. This paper investigates the application of expected thrust fraction to the Earth Return Orbiter’s outbound Earth-to-Mars trajectory and compares it with trajectories de- signed using traditional methods to mitigate missed thrust events. Through the use of expected thrust fraction, a trajectory with a baseline 65.4% success rate is im- proved to an 86.6% success rate at the cost of only a 12 kg reduction in delivered mass. Additionally, when expected thrust fraction is used in conjunction with a terminal coast, a 96.0% success rate is achieved, which is higher than any single mitigation technique.


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    Title :

    Expected Thrust Fraction: Resilient Trajectory Design Applied to the Earth Return Orbiter


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2021-01-31


    Type of media :

    Preprint


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English



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