Motion Primitive Approach to Spacecraft Trajectory Design in the Neptune-Triton System

A motion primitive approach is used to design spacecraft trajectories from a high-energy interplanetary arrival condition to a 3:4 resonant orbit in the Neptune-Triton system. A motion primitive library is constructed by using clustering to summarize arcs along periodic orbit families and their hyperbolic invariant manifolds in the circular restricted three-body problem. A graph that captures their potential connectivity is then searched to form motion primitive sequences. Selected sequences are refined and corrected to produce geometrically distinct spacecraft trajectories with flight times as low as 12.60 days and total impulsive maneuver requirements as low as 1.64 km/s.