Preliminary Planning For NEAR's Low-Altitude
On February 14, 2000, an orbit insertion burn will place NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft (S/C) into orbit around asteroid 433 Eros.
Engineering topics
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On February 14, 2000, an orbit insertion burn will place NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft (S/C) into orbit around asteroid 433 Eros.
This paper will provide preliminary plans for mission design and navigation during the last two weeks of the orbit phase, where several close passes to the surface will be incorporated to enhance the science return.
Trajectory design of the orbit phase of the NEAR mission involves a new process that departs significantly from those procedures used in previous missions. In most cases, a precise spacecraft ephemeris is designed well in advance of arrival at the target body.
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The terminal navigation of the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft during its flyby of asteroid 433 Eros on December 23, 1998 involved coordinated efforts to determine the heliocentric orbits of the spacecraft and Eros and then to determine the relative trajectory of the spacecraft with respect ot Eros.
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NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezous (NEAR) mission is currently on course for rendezous and orbit insertion about the asteroid 433 Eros in December 1998.
Trajectory design of the orbit phase of the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission involves procedures that depart significantly from those used for previous missions.
The Solar Probe will deliver a 133.5 kg science payload into a 4 R(S) perihelion solar polar orbit to explore in situ one of the last frontiers in the solar system - the solar corona. Using a payload of 12 scientific experiments, it will be possible to answer many long-standing fundamental problems concerning the structure and dynamics of the outer solar atmosphere, including the acceleration, storage, and transport of energetic particles near the sun and in the inner heliosphere.
Planned and proposed missions to study asteroids are examined. The history of asteroid studies in the 1980s is reviewed, including the proposed Mainbelt Asteroid Orbiter/Flyby mission. Main-belt asteroid flyby missions are discussed, including the Galileo, Cassini, and Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby mission. Also, consideration is given to proposed missions to near-earth asteroids, the Vesta mission to perform in situ studies on two large asteroids, the Piazzi mission to flyby an Apollo-Amor-Aten asteroid using a Giotto-derived spacecraft, and the possibility of a Japanese asteroid flyby mission.
The trajectory profile that will be used by Japan's Sakigake spacecraft to accomplish its extended-mission objectives is described. Currently, Sakigake is following a heliocentric trajectory that will return to the earth's vicinity in January 1992. Four earth gravity-assist maneuvers are planned to redirect Sakigake to an encounter with Comet Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova (HMP) in February 1996. While carrying out the earth-swingby maneuvers, the spacecraft will make several passes through previously unexplored regions of the distant geomagnetic tail.
The tracking of the ICE spacecraft at its encounter with the comet Giacobini-Zinner posed a major problem for the Deep Space Network (DSN). At the comet, ICE was nearly 50 times as distant from the earth as it was during its designed mission. Its signal strength at the ground was diminished by almost 2500 times from its designed level. The paper describes how the DSN met this challenge by combining antennas in arrays and cooperating with the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Usuda 64m antenna in Japan.
The ISEE-3/ICE spacecraft, (launched in 1978), and expected to obtain the first measurements of comet Giacobinni-Zinner in September 1985, has undertaken a combination of propulsive maneuvers, lunar swing-bys, and solar perturbations to produce its present trajectory profile. ISEE-3 is a drum-shaped, spin-stabilized spacecraft equipped with a redundant pair of high-resolution sun sensors, a medium-gain S-band antenna, a hydrazine propulsion system and a science experiment payload. After being placed into a sun-earth libration halo orbit in late 1978, ISEE-3 was retargeted to the geomagnetotail in mid-1982 and became the first spacecraft to explore the geomagnetic tail between 80 and 237 earth radii in 1983. These types of maneuvers may prove important for future scientific missions planned as follow-ons to ISEE-3/ICE, such as a joint NASA/ISAS project spacecraft scheduled for Shuttle launch in 1991, and a possible encounter with two comets in 1996 anad 1998.
The ISEE-3 spacecraft, currently in a figure-8 traverse of the geomagnetic tail between 80-220 earth radii, is being redirected to a flyby of the Giacobini-Zinner comet in 1985. The satellite carries experiments for the solar wind plasma, magnetic field data, plasma wave and composition, radio waves, and energetic protons, and can gather data on the solar wind-comet interaction. A double lunar swingby will be employed to establish the intercept trajectory, yielding a total velocity change of 100 m/sec, with a reserve of 100 m/sec for midcourse corrections. The comet will be encountered at a distance of 3000 km in September 1985, followed by passage through the Halley's comet tail 5000 km from the nucleus in March 1986.
Analog simulation of limit-cycle fuel consumption of spinning symmetric drag-free satellite