Recent Gravity‐Assist Trajectories for Interplanetary and Solar Exploration

Abstract

This paper describes how lunar and planetary gravity assists have been used to design trajectories that have enabled challenging missions, currently flying or in development, at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University, to explore the Sun, and the planets closest to and farthest from it. This is a continuation of a paper presented at the first New Trends in Astrodynamics and Applications conference, January 2003. That paper concentrated on the Third International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3) halo orbit mission, later known as the International Cometary Explorer, or ICE, and the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission of APL, and the ground-breaking orbits that those spacecraft used to accomplish their ambitious goals. This paper gives much more information about current APL missions, MESSENGER, STEREO, and New Horizons, which were only briefly described in the previous paper.