Asteroid mining has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of in-space manufacturing, production of propellant for space transportation and consumables for crewed spacecraft, compared to launching the required resources from the Earth's deep gravity well. This paper discusses the top-level mission architecture and trajectory design for these resource-return missions, comparing high-thrust trajectories with continuous low-thrust solar-sail trajectories. The paper focuses on maximizing the economic Net Present Value, which takes the time-cost of finance into account and therefore balances the returned resource mass and mission duration. The different propulsion methods are compared in terms of maximum economic return and sets of attainable target asteroids. Results for

No abstract

This paper investigates solar sail Earth-Mars cyclers, in particular cyclers between libration point orbits at the Earth-Moon L 2 point and the Sun-Mars L 1 point. In order to facilitate cyclers in as few Earth-Mars synodic periods as possible, the overall objective is to minimize the time of flight. These time-optimal cyclers are obtained by using a direct pseudospectral method and exploiting techniques from dynamical systems theory to obtain an initial guess. In particular, heteroclinic connections between the unstable and stable manifolds of the target libration point orbits at the Earth-Moon L 2 point and the Sun-Mars L 1 point are sought for. While such connections do not exist in the ballistic case, they can be achieved by complementing the dynamics with a solar sail and assuming a constant attitude of the sail with respect to the direction of sunlight. These trajectories are sub-optimal due to the assumed constant sail attitude as well as minor discontinuities in position and velocity at the linkage of the manifolds, which are overcome by transferring the initial guess to the direct pseudospectral optimal control solver. For near-to mid-term sails, results show time-optimal round-trip trajectories that span three synodic Earth-Mars periods, with a few months to one year stay times at the libration point orbits, depending on the time of departure within a five-month window. Through the propellant-less nature of solar sailing, these Earth-Mars cyclers can, in theory, be maintained indefinitely.

The concept of a pole-sitter has been under investigation for many years, showing the capability of a low-thrust propulsion system to maintain a spacecraft at a static position along a planet's polar axis.From such a position, the spacecraft has a view of the planet's polar regions equivalent to that of the low-and mid-latitudes from geostationary orbit. Previous work has hinted at the existence of polesitters that would only require a solar sail to provide the necessary propulsive thrust if a slight deviation from a position exactly along the polar axis is allowed, without compromising on the continuous view of the planet's polar region (a so-called quasi-pole-sitter). This paper conducts a further in-depth analysis of these high-potential solar-sail-only quasi-pole-sitters and presents a full end-to-end trajectory design: from launch and transfer to orbit design and orbit control. The results are the next steppingstone towards strengthening the feasibility and utility of these orbits for continuous planetary polar observation.

No abstract