Searching for gravity assisted trajectories to accessible near-Earth asteroids

Abstract

This paper explores the advantages of using gravity assisted trajectories to perform flyby and rendezvous missions to accessible near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), in terms of the total velocity budget required for the mission. Combining the Opik's formalism of close encounters with the Monte Carlo sampling technique and Lambert trajectories, we give a general picture of the accessibility regions for NEAs in phase space of orbital elements, without considering the phasing requirements between bodies.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html