Stochastic Mission Exploration Tool for Asteroid Tours

Abstract

Asteroid tours facilitate asteroid visitation in great volume but are notoriously difficult to design. There exists a substantial research effort toward designing optimal asteroid tours; however, there is minimal research toward exploring all tour solutions including those that exist far from local or global optima within the asteroid tour design space. In this paper, we introduce the Orbital Tours Through Exploratory Random Search (OTTERS) tool. The OTTERS tool uses a multiple-filtering method to preprune the asteroid candidate pool and a tree algorithm to stochastically construct feasible asteroid tours. The OTTERS tool emphasizes exploration and can construct a wide range of viable asteroid tour options to be considered for asteroid missions or mission extension projects. In this paper, we use the OTTERS tool to find 1,243,558 tour solutions ranging from 2 to 10 targets within the near-Earth asteroid population for a spacecraft given two launch dates that are one year apart.