Global Optimization of Interplanetary Trajectories in the Presence of Realistic Mission Constraints

Interplanetary missions are often subject to difficult constraints, like solar phase angle upon arrival at the destination, velocity at arrival, and altitudes for flybys. Preliminary design of such missions is often conducted by solving the unconstrained problem and then filtering away solutions which do not naturally satisfy the constraints. However this can bias the search into non-advantageous regions of the solution space, so it can be better to conduct preliminary design with the full set of constraints imposed. In this work a stochastic global search method is developed which is well suited to the constrained global interplanetary trajectory optimization problem.