A Mass-optimized Gravity Tractor for Asteroid Deflection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mass-optimized gravity tractor method for asteroid deflection, utilizing a spacecraft on a specific orbit segment to maximize deflection efficiency relative to spacecraft mass.

Contribution

It formulates a novel discrete nonlinear optimal control problem to optimize spacecraft mass in asteroid deflection using a gravity tractor approach.

Findings

The optimized gravity tractor significantly improves deflection efficiency.

Dynamic programming effectively solves the nonlinear control problem.

The method outperforms similar approaches in the literature.

Abstract

A method for asteroid deflection that makes use of a spacecraft moving back and forth on a segment of a Keplerian orbit about the asteroid is studied with the aim of optimizing the initial gross mass of the spacecraft. The corresponding optimization problem is formulated as a discrete nonlinear optimal control problem where the parameters of the orbit segment are the control variables. A hypothetical asteroid deflection problem is solved numerically using the method of dynamic programming, and it is shown that a gravity tractor can be obtained that is significantly more efficient in terms of deflection attained per unit mass of the spacecraft, compared to similar gravity tractors in the literature.