Surfing Chaotic Perturbations in Interplanetary Multi-Flyby Trajectories: Augmented Picard-Chebyshev Integration for Parallel and GPU Computing Architectures

The computational intensity of the trajectory design problem severely affects the development time of any space mission, both in its preliminary phase and in the consequent optimization. This paper presents a formulation of the design problem that can account for any force source in the dynamical model through efficient Picard-Chebyshev numerical simulations. A two-level augmentation of the integration scheme is proposed, to run an arbitrary number of simulations within the same algorithm call, fully exploiting high performance and GPU computing facilities. The performances obtained with implementation in C and NVIDIA® CUDA® programming languages are shown, highlighting possible use cases and paradigms for the efficient use of GPU computing architectures.