Reaching NEOs: solution for the second global trajectory optimization competition

The second global trajectory optimization competition was organized by the Outer Planets Mission Analysis Group of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was announced in October 2006. The competition objective was to find the global optimal low-thrust trajectory, maximizing a complex objective function over a huge search space. The problem was a multiple asteroid rendezvous: a trajectory had to be designed for a low-thrust spacecraft which departs from the Earth and subsequently performs a rendezvous with one asteroid chosen within each of four defined groups of asteroids. In this paper we present the results obtained by the Aerospace Engineering Department of Politecnico di Milano. The problem has been approached by means of a two-phase solution process. The first phase aims at determining a preliminary solution close to the global optimum that is refined in the second phase through a local optimization. In this work the two-phase approach is presented together with the obtained solution