AN INVESTIGATION OF A JUPITER GALILEAN MOON ORBITER TRAJECTORY

NASA’s mission to send a single electric propulsion spacecraft to or-bit Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa within a decade will require a very complex trajectory. Strong multi-body effects combined with low-thrust control of capture and escape will make the trajectory design challenging. This paper describes an optimal trajectory that begins in low Earth orbit and ends in low Io orbit. A spacecraft following this trajectory will orbit Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa in succession before orbiting Io. This tra-jectory highlights the complexity, some of the risks, and also some of the advantages that can be gained from using low-thrust in strong multi-body regimes. The optimization algorithm called Static/Dynamic Control was used to design the trajectory