Mission Analysis and Design

The future of space exploration and utilisation will be characterised by missions of increasing ambitious goals. In order to achieve these goals it is often more rewarding to explore new directions in the way a mission is conceived rather than to force the upgrade of an already existing technology.

Welcome to the site related to ACT activities in the field of mission analysis, where you can find information on past and ongoing projects.
Please check also our publications-page for studies and papers concerning mission analysis at the ACT (you can select papers on mission analysis using the right facet).

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Interplanetary Trajectory Design

Finding the best way to transfer a spacecraft between planets or orbits is generally a very complex problem which is often dealt with by resorting to the experience of the mission analyst aided in the different design phases by a suite of analytical and numerical tools.
An alternative to this approach, which promises to make the whole design process more straightforward and faster is to formulate the design problem as a global optimisation problem and to devise methods to solve it in an efficient way. Several advances in this direction have been achieved by the ACT in collaboration with leading European Universities.

Astrodynamic

Many new concepts and tools for mission analysis and design are often derived by a deeper understanding of the complex dynamical properties of orbiting systems and by advances in their analytical and numerical modeling.
Relative dynamics of orbiting spacecraft, analytical tools for low-thrust trajectories and modelling of asteroid post-deflection trajectories are some of the subjects of the current and past research activity of the ACT in this field.

Advanced Mission Concepts

This area covers all new concepts that could play an important role in shaping or inspiring future space exploration and utilisation missions. These include deployable space webs for large space structure assembly, controlled swarms of microsatellites through electrostatic forces and more.

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Don’t miss our new research interests, search for the MAD tag on our group on Diigo.