Design of a Solar Electric Propulsion mission for the interplanetary cubesat MARGO¶

These plots are produced by the following code:

import pykep as pk
pk.examples.run_example11()

This example demonstrates the use of the pykep.trajopt.lt_margo which represents, in cartesian coordinates, the solar electric propulsion mission of the interplanetary cubesat MARGO, studied during 2017 in the European Space Agency’s Concurrent Design Facility. The code was used to select the best candidates for the mission.

The MPCORB database object “2014 YD” is used as an example. You can also activate the Earth gravity by changing the kwarg in the constructor.

The code for this example can be studied here. Feel free to leave comments.

The study of MARGO target selection is found here:

Alessio Mereta and Dario Izzo: Target selection for a small low-thrust mission to near-Earth asteroids Astrodynamics, 2018.