Rendezvous Missions to Temporarily-Captured Near Earth Asteroids

TL;DR

This paper explores fuel-efficient transfer strategies for rendezvous missions with a temporarily-captured near-Earth asteroid, using advanced optimal control methods to minimize delta-v and demonstrate mission feasibility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining indirect and direct optimal control methods to design low-fuel transfer trajectories to TCOs, specifically for asteroid h.

Findings

Rendezvous with h can be achieved with low delta-v.

Optimal control methods effectively handle sensitivity issues.

The approach identifies promising candidate trajectories for TCO rendezvous.

Abstract

Missions to rendezvous with or capture an asteroid present significant interest both from a geophysical and safety point of view. They are key to the understanding of our solar system are as well stepping stones for interplanetary human flight. In this paper, we focus on a rendezvous mission with \RH, an asteroid classified as a Temporarily Captured Orbiter (TCO). TCOs form a new population of near Earth objects presenting many advantages toward that goal. Prior to the mission, we consider the spacecraft hibernating on a Halo orbit around the Earth-Moon's $L_2$ libration point. The objective is to design a transfer for the spacecraft from the parking orbit to rendezvous with \RH while minimizing the fuel consumption. Our transfers use indirect methods, based on the Pontryagin Maximum Principle, combined with continuation techniques and a direct method to address the sensitivity of the initialization. We demonstrate that a rendezvous mission with \RH can be accomplished with low delta-v. This exploratory work can be seen as a first step to identify good candidates for a rendezvous on a given TCO trajectory.