Artificial equilibrium points and bi-impulsive maneuvers to observe 243 Ida

• 作者: Allan Kardec de ALMEIDA Jr Geraldo Magela Couto OLIVEIRA Antonio Fernando Bertachini de Almeida PRADO
• 来源期刊: 中国航空学报（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（1）
• 页码范围: 410-423
• 页数: 14页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

In the restricted three-body problem, the traditional Lagrange points L1 and L2 are the only equilibrium points near the asteroid 243 Ida. The thrust generated by a solar sail over a space-craft enables the existence of new artificial equilibrium points, which depend on the position of the spacecraft with respect to the asteroid and the attitude of the solar sail. Such equilibrium points gen-erate new spots to observe the body from above or below the plane of motion. Such points are very good observational locations due to their stationary condition. This work provides a preliminary analysis to observe Ida through the use of artificial equilibrium points as spots combined with trans-fer maneuvers between them. Such combination can be used to observe the asteroid from more dif-ferent points of view in comparison to fixed ones. The analyses are made for a spacecraft equipped with a solar sail and capable of performing bi-impulsive maneuvers. The solar radiation pressure is used both to maintain the equilibrium condition and to reduce the costs of the transfers and/or to create transfers with longer duration. This is a new aspect of the present research, because it combi-nes the continuous thrust with initial and final small impulses, which are feasible for most of the spacecraft, because the magnitudes of the impulses are very low. These combined maneuvers may reduce the transfer times of the maneuvers in most of the cases, compared with the maneuvers based only on continuous thrust. Several options involved in these transfers are shown, like to minimize the fuel spent (Δv) as a function of the transfer time or to extend the duration of the travel between the points. Extended transfer times can be useful when observations are required during the transfers. ? 2020 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).