Design of End-to-End Trojan Asteroid Rendezvous Tours Incorporating Scientific Value

Abstract

The sun–Jupiter Trojan asteroids are celestial bodies of great scientific interest as well as potential natural assets offering mineral resources for long-term human exploration of the Solar System. Previous investigations have addressed the automated design of tours within the asteroid swarm and the transition of prospective tours to higher-fidelity, end-to-end trajectories. The current development incorporates the route-finding ant colony optimization algorithm into the automated tour-generation procedure. Furthermore, the potential scientific merit of the destination asteroids is incorporated such that encounters with higher-value asteroids are preferentially incorporated during sequence creation.