ESA F-Class Comet Interceptor: Trajectory Design to Intercept a Yet-to-be-discovered Comet
Joan Pau Sánchez, David Morante, Pablo Hermosin, Daniel Ranuschio, Alvaro Estalella, Dayana Viera, Simone Centuori, Geraint Jones, Colin Snodgrass, Anny Chantal Levasseur-Regourd, Cecilia Tubiana
Comet Interceptor (Comet-I) was selected in June 2019 as the first ESA F-Class mission. In 2029+, Comet-I will hitch a ride to a Sun-Earth L2 quasi-halo orbit, as a co-passenger of ESA’s M4 ARIEL mission. It will then remain idle at the L2 point until the right departure conditions are met to intercept a yet-to-be-discovered long period comet (or interstellar body). The fact that Comet-I target is thus unidentified becomes a key aspect of the trajectory and mission design. The paper first analyses the long period comet population and concludes that 2 to 3 feasible targets a year should be expected. Yet, Comet-I will only be able to access some of these, depending mostly on the angular distance between the Earth and the closest nodal point to the Earth’s orbit radius. A preliminary analysis of the transfer trajectories has been performed to assess the trade-off between the accessible region and the transfer time for a given spacecraft design, including a fully chemical, a fully electric and a hybrid propulsion system. The different Earth escape options also play a paramount role to enhance Comet-I capability to reach possible long period comet targets. Particularly, Earth-leading intercept configurations have the potential to benefit the most from lunar swing-by departures. Finally, a preliminary Monte Carlo analysis shows that Comet-I has a 95 to 99% likelihood of successfully visit a pristine newly-discovered long period comet in less than 6 years of mission timespan.
Comments: Preprint version of paper accepted for Acta Astronautica
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Space Physics (physics.space-ph)
DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.07.014
Cite as: arXiv:2107.12999 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2107.12999v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Joan Pau Sanchez
[v1] Tue, 27 Jul 2021 16:01:51 UTC (1,354 KB)
