Engineering Commons^™

Multi-Objective Optimization Mission Design For Small-Body Coverage Missions, David William Hinckley

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Missions concerning small-body celestial objects are of growing interest due to the resources and information they can provide. Such missions require detailed information about the surface of the body for interactions, such as landing on the surface, as well as predicting the gravity field of the object. This work provides a means of optimizing the mission elements of trajectory and imaging target schedules so that the level of knowledge of the surface can be increased. The information required to increase one's knowledge of the surface is described as a set of conditions placed on the collection of images taken of …

Quadrature-Based Gravity Models For The Homogeneous Polyhedron, Jason Pearl

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

A number of missions to comets and asteroids have been undertaken by major space organizations driving a need to accurately characterize their gravitational fields. This is complicated however by their irregular shapes. To accurately and safely navigate spacecraft in these environments, a simple point-mass gravity model is insufficient and instead higher-fidelity models are required. Several such models exist for this purpose but all posess drawbacks. Moreover, there are some applications for which the currently available models are not particular well suited.

In this dissertation, numerical quadrature and curvilinear meshing techniques are applied to the small body gravity problem. The goal …