Japan probe overshoots Venus, heads toward sun - 0 views
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A Japanese probe to Venus failed to reach orbit Wednesday and was captured by the sun's gravitational pull
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The usefulness of having a robust trajectory :) ... They have to wait 6 more years for another date with Venus ...
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I agree in general but just out of the stomach: is there really an optimised trajectory that would be able to avoid this kind of scenarios when main thrusters don't perform properly? Wouldn't you in any case end up in a sun-orbiting trajectory and have to come back after years??
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"optimised trajectory" of course not, robust definitely! It was the subject of my paper presented at the AAS (the one in San Diego) "Designing robust interplanetary trajectories subject to one temporary engine failure". The problem here is that they do not have enough fuel for a correction maneuver that would allow to come back to Venus earlier, and break for a VOI. A robust scenario could have alloted the best amount of fuel and time to be able to recover from almost all possible unplanned events. In the paper, I introduce some confidence regions such that I get the robust control for p% chance of mission success in case m% chance of problem with the propulsion system.
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You should run your method on this scenario and see if you could get a trajectory with a shorter come back time using the same spacecraft.... would be a big selling point for a new trajectory design approach