New Open Access paper on Planetary Protection

The new Open Access paper by Alessandro Masat, Matteo Romano and Camilla Colombo introduces the use of KS regularised variables for Planetary Protection analysis. The equations of motions are re-written so that a quasi-linear formulation is achieved, introducing significant computational benefits.

The state space dimension is raised from 6 to 8, the additional degrees of freedom are exploited to maximise the numerical stability of the dynamical system, leading to optimal computational performances.

The proposed implementation makes single simulations and, therefore, the complete planetary protection analysis twice as fast as the traditional Cartesian dynamics. Moreover, the propagated trajectory results ten times more accurate at the end of the integration span.

https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.G006255