Mission Design for Flyback Boosters: Towards Reusable Launch Vehicles

The development of reusable launch vehicles in space exploration is a significant paradigm shift in the aerospace industry. Among numerous approaches to fully reusable launchers, a flyback booster, complemented by the emerging importance of spaceplanes, stands out as a viable solution. To outweigh the drawbacks associated with the cost, a...

Frozen Orbit Design and Stability: An Application to Asteroid Apophis during its 2029 Earth Flyby

Apophis, an Aten-type asteroid, was considered a significant threat to Earth upon its discovery due to its potential impact with Earth in 2029. Although the collision has now been ruled out, Apophis will still perform an exceptionally close flyby of Earth that same year at a distance of 32,000 km from the surface. This event presents a unique...

Trajectory Optimization Methods for Low-Thrust Kuiper Belt Flyby Missions

The Kuiper belt is one of the last mostly unexplored regions in the Solar System. Exploration of the Kuiper belt can greatly increase humanity's understanding of the Solar System's formation and evolution. The use of low-thrust propulsion for Kuiper belt missions has the potential to improve the payload mass of the mission due to the high...

CASPA-ADM: a mission concept for observing thermospheric mass density

Cold Atom technology has undergone rapid development in recent years and has been demonstrated in space in the form of cold atom scientific experiments and technology demonstrators, but has so far not been used as the fundamental sensor technology in a science mission. The European Space Agency therefore funded a 7-month project to define the...

Quasi-periodic invariant tori and retrieval of Near-Earth Asteroids using low-energy trajectories

Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) have attracted the attention of the scientific community in the last few years. Not only because of their importance to life on Earth but also their scientific potential and possible economic returns. This work explores the use of quasi-periodic orbits to bound the motion of NEAs close to the Earth’s vicinity for...

A Rapid Grid-Search Technique for KBO Exploration Trajectories

The Kuiper Belt is considered to be formed by remnants of the original Solar System, that is why exploration missions to that region are susceptible of having an enormous scientific impact. Nonetheless, it is far away from Earth, missions to KBO targets a significant challenge. Additionally, current methods to identify trajectories that...

Feasibility Study of LUFAR

With the steady increase in space missions, enabled through technological advances and increase of commercialisation within the space flight industry, both more and increasingly complex missions can be designed for space. To this end, the Lunar Zebro project competes within this field through its small lunar rover design, drastically decreasing...

Mission Planning for Deep Sea Robots

Our challenge was to define a format for a mission plan, and develop an application which allows the users of the robot to create a mission plan effectively. This application should assist the user in the process of creating a mission plan as much as possible. Our client was Allseas who was already the sponsor of the LOBSTER project. During the...

Targeting a Mars science orbit from Earth using dual chemical-electric propulsion and ballistic capture

Ballistic capture is a relatively novel concept in interplanetary mission design with the potential to make Mars and other targets in the Solar System more accessible. A complete end-to-end interplanetary mission from an Earth-bound orbit to a stable science orbit around Mars (in this case, an areostationary orbit) has been conducted using this...

Integrating hardware data into simulation models for Attitude Control System design

Space mission design is an activity that deals with a highly complex, non-linear system of which the requirements and characteristics are subject to regular change. This has consequences on the mathematical design but also the translation to hardware. In this thesis, we explore the use of Integrated Mission Design (IMD); a data-driven design...

Multi-Flyby Mission to a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid: Improving the Earth Impact Probability Knowledge

The feasibility of improving the Earth collision uncertainty knowledge of a potentially Earth impacting asteroid by means of a multi-flyby mission has been researched in this thesis. The feasibility is assessed both from an astrodynamics point of view and from a systems engineering point of view. The astrodynamics part provides knowledge...

Cubesat Deployment Trajectories for the Asteroid Impact Mission

Missions to Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are a growing trend in spaceflight. The interest for such bodies is not only justified by the threat that they represent for the Earth, but also because they are potential sources of extra-terrestrial materials, provide windows to the past of the Solar System and to planetary formation, and offer a good...

Building on Mars: An Evolvable Design Strategy for the Architectural Engineer

Humans are going to Mars and the plan is to achieve this within the next couple of decades. In mission architectures the habitat is considered a sub-system in the overall mission’s system architecture. In current mission engineering, the crew’s psychology is barely considered in the design of the mission. In aerospace engineering, one refers to...

Earth frozen orbits: Design, injection and stability

A frozen orbit is an orbit chosen such that the effect of perturbations on (a combination of) the mean orbital elements is minimized. The concept first appeared in literature in 1978, and was applied that same year to the Seasat mission. This altimetry mission featured strict requirements on the accuracy of the altitude of the satellite above...

Application of the Spherical Shaping Method to a Low-Thrust Multiple Asteroid Rendezvous Mission: Implementation, limitations and solutions

Since the development of the exponential sinusoid for low-thrust trajectory design by Petropoulos and Longuski [2004], more shape-based methods have emerged that ease up the work of a mission analyst. These methods are the ideal tool to generate a quick and almost complete overview of a large search space and are useful for producing first...

Mission Design of the Dutch-Chinese FAST Micro-Satellite Mission

The paper treats the mission design for the Dutch-Chinese FAST (Formation for Atmospheric Science and Technology demonstration) mission. The space segment of the 2.5 year mission consists out of two formation flying micro-satellites. During the mission, new technologies will be demonstrated and, using spectropolarimeter and altimeter payloads on...