Target selection and accessibility for rendezvous with a Near-Earth asteroid mission

Abstract

Mission to asteroids and comets has been the hot spot of deep space exploration in the new century. The choice of a suitable target, which involves both scientific value and technical feasibility, becomes a difficult task to accomplish due to limited energy and technology. The aim of this paper is to provide an approach to selecting a target and evaluating accessibility for rendezvous with a Near-Earth Asteroid mission, taking into account scientific value and engineering feasibility. Firstly, according to the orbital characteristics and physical properties of Near-Earth asteroids, we make a summary of some of the most frequent factors influencing the target selection of scientific significance. When selecting the target for a space mission, these factors can be regarded as the scientific motivations. Then in order to avoid the possibility that some high priority targets for science would be discarded due to requiring too high an energy budget by using a classical direct transfer strategy, we calculate the transfer trajectory for rendezvous with candidates by using the planetary swingby technique and the global optimal two-impulse method. Finally, through a comparison between the scientific relevance of each possible target and the corresponding estimate of energy needed for rendezvous missions, the ranking of some candidates is identified.