Abstract:

The Dawn mission is scheduled to arrive at Vesta on July2011. In order to reach its lowest science orbit, the Dawn spacecraft needs to go across the 1:1 resonant region ("Vesta-stationary orbits"). Motivated by this, this talk will show preliminary results of a study of this region, done by analogy with the collinear libration points of the spatial, circular RTBP. Some transfers across it using invariant manifolds of periodic orbits will be shown.

Joint work with S. Broschart (NASA-JPL) and B.F. Villac (UC Irvine).