Two-dimensional launch window method to search for launch opportunities of interplanetary missions

Abstract Accurate and highly efficient approaches to obtain mission opportunities are still the goals of mission planners of interplanetary explorations. The search for launch opportunities not only determines the specified launch window of the mission but also presents the performance requirements for the interplanetary probe and its launch vehicle. An effective method, namely the two-dimensional launch window method, is developed from a completely new perspective to determine all the launch opportunities of the mission in this research. For a fixed launch time, the method to determine all the time windows in the dimension of Time-of-Flight (TOF) is firstly proposed and these time windows represent all the launch opportunities for the given launch time. And then, the two-dimensional launch window method is proposed, which computes the time windows in both the launch time and TOF dimensions to achieve all launch opportunities of the mission. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the accuracy and high efficiency of the method. Compared with the widely-used pock-chop plot method, the proposed method reduces the computational time by two orders of magnitude for the same search precision, and thus is especially suitable for the cases involving rapid, high-precision, and/or large-scale searches for mission opportunities.