Research in trajectory optimization and development of jTOP to enable advanced space mission design.

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The past year has witnessed a democratization of space exploration, with CubeSats being awarded a free ticket to the Moon . 13 missions were selected to fly as piggy back on Exploration Mission-1 , the maiden launch of NASA’s new rocket SLS: two of those missions are lead by JAXA, OMOTENASHI and EQUULEUS.The trajectory optimization software jTOP, and its core propagation module jPRO, developed in this KAKENHI grant, are key components of both missions. EQUULEUS will orbit the Largangian points of the Earth-Moon system. One of the main objectives of EQUULEUS is testing the orbit control capabilities of the microsat. jTOP is a main component for this investigation and was also a fundamental tool for the mission proposal, and has been used by several students in The University of Tokyo and ISAS for the mission design.OMOTENASHI is a challenging lunar lander, where the robust trajectory design is coupled with orbit determination and statistical execution errors. In this case, millions of trajectories are computed open loop by jPRO, in a high fidelity, with both impulsive maneuver and continuous thrust.KAKENHI grant was used successfully for the development jTOP and jPRO, which have been used by dozens of master and PhStudents in the last year for their research and for the trajectory design work for both missions. While the new approach has yet to appear in refereed publication, a number of papers have been presented at international conferences, where the main results are achieved by using jTOP.