Guidance and Control for Re-entry Vehicles in the Terminal Area: Application of Pseudospectral Methods

One part of spaceflight technology that has always been in demand is to go to space using a vehicle that can be re-used without much additional costs. It is roughly five years ago that the last Space Shuttle mis- sion took place, and replacements are currently in development. Yet, much of the available literature is still based on architectures...

Trajectory Design for a Solar Polar Observatory

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a methodology to design trajectories in order to achieve high ecliptic inclinations for the purpose of solar observation. Solar observatories have been launched since the dawn of the space era, and are still being designed today, however the solar poles have seldom been imaged. This is partly because...

Aerogravity assists: Hypersonic maneuvering to improve planetary gravity assists

Interplanetary missions use gravitational slingshots around planetary bodies to adjust their heliocentric velocity or inclination for quite some time. The momentum exchange that can be achieved during a so-called gravity assist is limited by the mass of the planetary body. To overcome this limitation, an aerogravity assist was proposed, a...

Optimisation Strategies for Galilean Moon Tours: Low-Thrust Multiple Gravity-Assist Trajectory Design for GTOC6

Around 1610 Galileo Galilei made his discovery of the four large moons orbiting Jupiter which are referred to now as the Galilean moons. The moons Europa and Ganymede attract a significant amount of scientific interest due to potential present subsurface oceans. As consequence, the design of missions to go there and explore the moon system are...

Autonomous Nevigation of Nano-satellites during Earth-Moon Transfer

Design of Convex Guidance for the Final Phase of Satellite Rendezvous: Tested using Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulations

Over the past decades the steep increase in the number of space-debris objects have sparked many studies into active space-debris removal. Past collisions have shown that space debris is a very real threat to operational satellites and active debris removal is necessary to stabilize the situation. ESA has, therefore, performed multiple studies...

LOFAR on the Moon: Mission Configuration and Orbit Design

Unperturbed observation of deep space radio waves is impossible to achieve from Earth but could be managed if the instruments were positioned in a place shielded from Earth, such as the far side of the Moon or the Shackleton crater, situated at its South Pole. In order to keep the costs of such a mission as low as possible, the VEGA launcher...

The Ballistic Deployment of Asteroid Landers

The deployment of passive, spherical lander pods provides a low-cost, low-risk technique for measuring the (sub-)surface of asteroids and comets. In this masters thesis, we numerically investigate the feasibility of such pods through the development of simulation software. This software models the complex gravity field of asteroids, as well as...