Trajectory Design and Maintenance of the Martian Moons eXploration Mission Around Phobos

The Martian Moons eXploration mission, currently under development by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), will be launched in 2024 with the goal of retrieving pristine samples from the surface of Phobos. Soon after arrival, the spacecraft will inject into retrograde relative trajectories known as quasi-satellite orbits and study the geophysical environment of the Martian moon for more than three years. This paper presents the orbit design and maintenance strategy of the Martian Moons eXploration mission in the framework of the elliptic Hill problem with ellipsoidal secondary. This paper first introduces a numerical continuation procedure on the eccentricity of Phobos to replace purely periodic solutions with families of quasi-periodic invariant tori. Two-dimensional torus maps can be then constructed and used to represent physical quantities of interest, as well as to generate reference trajectories at arbitrary epochs. Sensitivity and stability analyses are carried out to investigate the dynamic properties of retrograde relative trajectories in the elliptic case. Finally, a linear quadratic regulator is implemented in order to assess the robustness of the computed trajectories under injection, navigation, and execution errors. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that the baseline quasi-satellite orbits of the Martian Moons eXploration mission can be maintained with as low as 6.265 m/s per month.

Automated summary

The Martian Moons eXploration mission aims to retrieve samples from the surface of Phobos, with the spacecraft planned to enter quasi-satellite orbits upon arrival for over three years of study. The paper presents the orbit design and maintenance strategy within the framework of the elliptic Hill problem, including numerical continuation procedures and sensitivity analyses to ensure the robustness of the mission trajectories.