Design of optimal spacecraft-asteroid formations through a hybrid global optimization approach

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology and experimental results on using global optimization algorithms to determine the optimal orbit, based on the mission requirements, for a set of spacecraft flying in formation with an asteroid.Design/methodology/approach – A behavioral‐based hybrid global optimization approach is used to first characterize the solution space and find families of orbits that are a fixed distance away from the asteroid. The same optimization approach is then used to find the set of Pareto optimal solutions that minimize both the distance from the asteroid and the variation of the Sun‐spacecraft‐asteroid angle. Two sample missions to asteroids, representing constrained single and multi‐objective problems, were selected to test the applicability of using an in‐house hybrid stochastic‐deterministic global optimization algorithm (Evolutionary Programming and Interval Computation (EPIC)) to find optimal orbits for a spacecraft flying in formation with an orbit. The ...

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