ILIAS: A tour to Trojan asteroids

The paper presents a feasibility study for a mission to study Jupiter's Trojans, with particular focus on the trajectory design of the asteroid tour and proximity operations. Exploiting a database of hundreds of bodies and 3-body dynamics, it proposes a quantitative approach to the problem, providing optimal solutions that are prone to further refinements in higher fidelity models. These solutions are optimal in terms of costs, time of flight or scientific return (i.e. solutions that involve asteroids with different known spectral classes). It is observed that tours including fly-bys are characterized by costs of tens of meters per second, while orbit closure around an asteroid requires costs of hundreds of meters per second. It follows a study of the behavior of the spacecraft in the neighborhood of irregular shaped and low attractive bodies, whose potential is modeled as a proper combination of potentials of simpler geometrical shapes. The overall design of the tour is then fundamental for the definition of power and mass budgets.