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Completed TRL 3 (started at 2, targeting 3)
Missions designed to explore cislunar and deep space are imperative to meeting NASA’s goal of expanding humanity’s knowledge of the solar system and our scientific understanding of the universe. However, multi-body systems have complex gravitational environments while the mission and spacecraft hardware impose a variety of constraints. Constructing a trajectory within chaotic systems while sufficiently exploring the solution space is time-consuming, requires an adequate initial guess, and expert knowledge of the environment. To overcome these limitations, the development of new innovative technologies for trajectory design in chaotic regimes is vital to enable successful and sustainable future space exploration missions. The objective of this research is to develop a new technology for constructing complex trajectories in chaotic multi-body systems by using roadmap generation techniques and dynamical systems theory. First, an efficient technique will be developed that will define the nodes and edges required to construct a roadmap, developing fundamental paths in the CR3BP via dynamical systems theory. Next, a search algorithm will be selected and implemented to efficiently construct an initial guess for a feasible, low cost trajectory from the generated roadmap. Lastly, an efficient method to correct the initial guess will be developed to recover a nearby continuous, end-to-end trajectory in a multi-body system. This research will enable an effective and computationally feasible approach to explore the solution space and construct an initial guess by biasing the sampling step during roadmap construction via dynamical structures generated by DST. This new technology will support mission planning in cislunar and deep space via autonomous trajectory design and accommodate changing conditions or unforeseen scenarios by enabling rapid design and redesign. As a result, this new technology will address NASA’s strategic goals to expand the capabilities of space exploration by enabling advanced missions to new destinations to expand human knowledge through new scientific discoveries.
This new technology will support mission planning in cislunar and deep space via autonomous trajectory design and accommodate changing conditions or unforeseen scenarios by enabling rapid design and redesign.
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