Resonant Fly-by Missions to near Earth Asteroids

The authors here propose a mission scenario, aimed at close exploration of a Near-Earth Asteroid, exploiting low-ΔV resonant trajectories. These trajectories allow repeated fly-bys of a chosen target. A selection procedure, which has been used to find some interesting mission opportunities in the 2005-2015 time frame, is described and the corresponding detailed mission profiles are derived, using an indirect optimization method.