CHEMICAL AND SOLAR ELECTRIC PROPULSION ORBIT MATCHING FOR MARS SAMPLE RENDEZVOUS

A concept for returning samples from the surface of Mars involves rendezvous between an orbiter and a passive sample container in low Mars orbit. This work presents orbit matching maneuver design approaches for chemical and solar electric propulsion (SEP) options. The chemical scheme selects maneuver pairs to setup desired node and phase drifts in tandem. The SEP scheme optimizes the averaged relative dynamics accounting for eclipses, drift due to J(2), and attitude rate constraints. The performance of these approaches is analyzed as a function of orbit inclination and sample container state dispersions.