Design of a Pipeline for Satellite-Aided Capture at the Giant Planets of the Solar System

For orbiters aiming at the outer planets of our solar system, most of the ∆V cost is associated with the final insertion at the targeted planet. An efficient way of reducing this cost is using flybys of the moons of the planet to reduce the energy of the orbit at arrival, called satellite-aided capture.Designing a full transfer from the Earth to an outer planet, including multiple gravity assists and satellite-aided capture raises important issues that must be addressed. One of them is the multiple control parameters that are required to compute such a trajectory. These parameters must be varied over a large array of values to guarantee that all possibilities are covered with enough precision, ensuring that the final trajectory is the best possible. Current approaches on satellite-aided capture mainly focus on designing trajectories inside the sphere of influence of the targeted planet, with no or minimal focus on linking it to the interplanetary trajectory. However, it remains to create a full pipeline to compute a transfer trajectory from the Earth to an outer planet of the solar system using multiple gravity assists and satellite-aided capture.This paper will focus on creating such a pipeline for orbiters targeting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. First, different multiple gravity assists sequences are computed, allowing to make a choice based on transfer time and ∆V cost. This is obtained with a multi-objective dynamic programming exploration, allowing to capture optimal Pareto fronts of ∆V and time of flight in limited computational effort. This transfer sets initial conditions of the satellite-aided capture. Multiple capture sequences are computed around these initial conditions allowing to choose the one minimizing the insertion ∆V . Finally, the last branch of the interplanetary transfer is modified to meet the updated initial conditions of the interplanetary transfer. To compute the satellite-aided capture, the branches between the moons of the sequences are simulated using Lambert arcs. The flybys are approximated as discrete events and are computed to meet the conditions set by the previous and following branches. This pipeline is capable of reproducing scenarios of previous missions to Jupiter and Saturn, ensuring proper functioning of the code. It can also be used to design new trajectories for orbiter at Uranus and Neptune, which have only been visited by Voyager 2 during flybys.