Low Energy Mission Planning Toolbox

The Low Energy Mission Planning Toolbox is designed to significantly reduce the resources and time spent on designing missions in multi-body gravitational environments. It provides a means for quickly planning low energy missions that take advantage of multi-body gravitational environments. The high-speed, efficient process will allow rapid comparison between low energy methods (e.g. ballistic lunar capture transfer trajectories) and their direct counterparts (e.g. Hohmann transfers). The tools leverage recent research on low energy mission design methods to produce algorithms that are stable, hold potential for automation in certain situations, and can be easily interfaced with the NASA open source mission planing tool GMAT.

Exploration in multi-body gravitational systems has been an active topic in academic institutions for many years. The Low Energy Mission Planning Toolbox would be a valuable tool in an academic setting to aid the research into these systems. The toolbox's use of the Matlab computing environment would allow easy transition into the academic setting. Additionally, the commercial exploration of the Moon is becoming an active industry. The toolbox's ease of use would be attractive to private companies searching to develop low-cost missions to the Moon. The toolbox would potentially enable mission planners who are not specialists in low energy transfers to reliably target them and exploit their fuel cost savings.

The proposed toolbox will enable rapid mission design in multi-body gravitational environments. Potential applications include transfers from the Earth to the Moon as well as lunar tour missions in other planetary systems. Specific low energy missions include the upcoming GRAIL mission, and the Europa Jupiter System Mission and the Titan Saturn System Mission under consideration for launch in 2020. The toolbox would aid in the establishment of a lunar base as foreseen in the Constellation program. Rapid low energy mission design would allow mission planners to fully exploit the savings that can be achieved by transporting non-human cargo to the Moon via low energy transfer.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 4) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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