Rendezvous missions to temporarily captured near Earth asteroids

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• 作者：S. Brelsford^a ; M. Chyba^a ; ^{chyba@hawaii.edu" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author} ; T. Haberkorn^b ; G. Patterson^a
• 关键词：Temporarily captured objects ; Three and four-body problem ; Optimal control ; Indirect numerical methods
• 刊名：Planetary and Space Science
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：April 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：123
• 期：Complete
• 页码：4-15
• 全文大小：2115 K

文摘

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 and are stepping stones for interplanetary human flight. In this paper, we focus on a rendezvous mission with 2006 RH₁₂₀, 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 L₂ libration point. The objective is to design a transfer for the spacecraft from the parking orbit to rendezvous with 2006 RH₁₂₀ 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 2006 RH₁₂₀ 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.