MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION OF SPACECRAFT TRAJECTORIES FOR SMALL-BODY COVERAGE MISSIONS WITH NON-KEPLERIAN ORBITAL DYNAMICS

Visual coverage of surface elements of a small celestial body requires multiple images to be taken that must satisfy numerous requirements on their viewing angles, illumination angles, times of day, and combinations thereof. Finding trajectories that allow for these conditions to be met in a timely manner is a non-trivial task and is made more difficult by the competing criteria for such trajectories. This work phrases the search for suitable trajectories as an optimization problem handled with a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm.