Ivar asteroid exploration mission and trajectory design

As the successful launches of various spacecraft, the exploration of comet and asteroids has become an important part of deep space exploration efforts in the new century. In this paper, a plan of Chinese to explore asteroid ivar using "Expedition 1" spacecraft is presented. With the constraints given, such as launch date, post-launch ΔV total ΔV and so on, the asteroid exploration opportunities satisfying all the conditions and having launch dates in 2006 to 2010 are searched and calculated. Ivar 1627 is selected as the target asteroid. Based on the main drivers of simplicity and low cost, the micro-spacecraft system for this project is designed and the overall arrangement and characteristics of the spacecraft are described, the subsystems including propulsion subsystem, attitude and trajectory control subsystem, electrical power subsystem and command telemetry subsystem are designed and analyzed in detail, and the micro deep space spacecraft designed may demonstrate and validate much relative technology. Finally the transfer trajectory is designed for rendezvous with asteroid Ivar 1627 using Δ VEGA technology, Δ VEGA technology includes one deep-space maneuver and one gravity-assist (with assist of gravitation of the earth), and the time interval between launch and encounter with earth again is 2 years. By the analysis of the trajectory performance, we can summarize that although the flight time of Δ VEGA trajectory transfer is near 2 years longer than that of direct transfer, it can reduce ΔV for escaping from the earth from 5.355km/s to 4.371km./s. The result acquired shows that the trajectory scenario design satisfies energy requirements for small explorers.