A New Environment to Simulate the Dynamics in the Close Proximity of Rubble-Pile Asteroids

This paper presents a new environment to simulate close-proximity dynamics around rubble-pile asteroids. The code provides methods for modeling the aster-oid’s gravity field and surface through granular dynamics. It implements state-of-the-art techniques to model both gravity and contact interaction between particles: 1) mutual gravity as either direct N2 or Barnes-Hut GPU-parallel octree and 2) contact dynamics with a soft-body (force-based, smooth dynamics), hard-body (constraint-based, non-smooth dynamics), or hybrid (constraint-based with compliance and damping) approach. A very relevant feature of the code is its ability to handle complex-shaped rigid bodies and their full 6D motion. Examples of spacecraft close-proximity scenarios and their numerical simulations are shown.