Return Trajectory of Martian Moons eXplorer Using Chemical–Electric Hybrid Propulsion

抄録

The Martian Moons eXplorer, the objective of which is to obtain a sample from a Martian moon, was presented by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. For its trajectory design, some configurations of a propulsion system were considered using a comparison of the fuel efficiency and total mission time. The use of chemical and electric propulsion for its return trajectory was introduced in order to realize a fast and low-energy escape from Mars. In this configuration, the spacecraft departs from Mars using three-body dynamics with chemical propulsion and using electric propulsion for a v-infinity leveraging maneuver (VILM). In this paper, we first propose the modified all-three-body method, which constructs the escape and VILM trajectories using three-body dynamics to obtain the chemical–electric hybrid-propulsion return trajectory. We then propose the integrated three-and-two-body method, which uses three-body dynamics at the edge of the sphere of influence and integrates it into two-body dynamics in order to use a two-body-based low-thrust optimizer. A comparison of the integrated three-and-two-body methods and modified all-three-body method is performed. Furthermore, the patched conics method is used to compare the optimized solution obtained using the two-body and three-body dynamics.