Asteroid Grand Tour Options

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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?

[djellison]

Your flyby velocity would be ENORMOUS though - you might sail past something like Matilde or Eros at 4 or 5km/sec on a conventional flyby - and then maybe 20km/sec if you were going the other way....eek. I'm fairly sure that you could do something like CONTOUR for asteroids with some intelligent trajectory design, 3, 4 asteroids with 3 or 4 times the data collected at each one. If you picked them right, you would get a good 'grab bag' of different types of bodies. Going the other way I imagine the spacecraft would be going "ARHGHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" all the time Perhaps you could bounce in and out ot the asteroid belt using Mars as a grav-assist teach time. Dawn but without the orbiting - you could get really nice long lazy flybys of many asteroids I would have thought. If you're going to Jupiter you would have to have crazy Juno/Rosetta like solar arrays, and if you're getting THOSE< might as well just use 2-3kw and chuck an ion engine or 5 on the back.

Doug