Asteroid Grand Tour Options

[nprev]

This article from JPL describes recent efforts to derive a main belt multi-asteroid mission trajectory...any of you orbitsmiths out there have some early thoughts/observations?

[Floyd]

The four asteroid tour (each a different type) is a very interesting problem. It is a hard version of the traveling salesman problem where you try to minimize the travel distance of visiting a bunch of cities (a NP-complete problem). To make it interesting, all the cities are moving around—they are asteroids--and you don’t know which four to pick initially. While a great deal is known about NP-complete problems, the asteroid tour is a new twist. To get a winning tour requires bring together a team with great math and computer algorithm skills as well as models for where several thousand asteroids of the four types are going to be for the next several years. Since a frontal approach to the problem would take up years of computer time (if not the age of the universe) the trick is to come up with brilliant assumptions and shortcuts that make it a problem that is doable on reasonable computer (or cluster) in a few weeks. My hats off to the team from Polytechnic of Turin, Italy.

Floyd