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University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Aerospace Engineering

Astrodynamics

Publication Year

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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Deep Space Mission Opportunities To Planet Nine & Eris, Allison G. Carroll Aug 2023

Deep Space Mission Opportunities To Planet Nine & Eris, Allison G. Carroll

Masters Theses

This research focuses on interplanetary mission design concepts, with the first topic being the study of mission opportunities to Planet Nine, otherwise known as Planet X. Previous studies have speculated about the existence of a large, distant planet beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. A recent study based on the apparent clustering of perihelia and orbital planes of distant Kuiper Belt Objects identified the most probable values for five of the planet’s orbital elements. However, the true anomaly is still unknown. In this research, a range of critical mission parameters for a Planet X trajectory is analyzed as a …


Development And Analysis Of Onboard Translunar Injection Targeting Algorithms, Phillippe Lyles Winters Reed May 2011

Development And Analysis Of Onboard Translunar Injection Targeting Algorithms, Phillippe Lyles Winters Reed

Masters Theses

Several targeting algorithms are developed and analyzed for possible future use onboard a spacecraft. Each targeter is designed to determine the appropriate propulsive burn for translunar injection to obtain desired orbital parameters upon arrival at the moon. Primary design objectives are to minimize the computational requirements for each algorithm but also to ensure reasonable accuracy, so that the algorithm’s errors do not force the craft to conduct large mid-course corrections. Several levels of accuracy for dynamical models are explored, the convergence range and speed of each algorithm are compared, and the possible benefits of the Broyden and trust-region targeters are …