design space pruning heuristics and global optimization method for ...

methodology would be applied in the same way as it was applied to the
GTOC3 (single group of asteroids) or GTOC2 (multiple groups of
asteroids) problem. Because only two asteroids are visited and Earth
return is required, the first pruning metric would not be employed
(increasing semi-major axis).
b. In 2009, the Augustine Commission completed its report on the future of
NASA human spaceflight. 80
Several options for initial exploration beyond
low-Earth orbit were described, one of which consists of visiting a series
of locations and objects in the inner solar system. In this Flexible Path
architecture, the time duration and complexity of the missions slowly
builds, beginning with human missions to the Lagrange points, followed
by missions to near-Earth objects, and finally human missions to Mars. It
calls for visiting several near-Earth objects in order to return samples,
practice operations near a small body, and potentially practice in-situ
resource utilization. While the plans call for only a single asteroid
rendezvous, an interesting offshoot would be to look at a multiple-asteroid
rendezvous human mission, in order to increase the mission duration
before the first human mission to Mars.
Two possible related mission design problems could be of interest in this
case. First would be the trajectory design of the human mission to the
asteroids. This would likely employ chemical (high-thrust) propulsion,
but the methodology could still be applied to determine a set of good
solutions. In this case, the objective would be to minimize ∆V and time of
flight (or simply constraint time of flight to some upper bound) and to
minimize Earth arrival velocity. The pruning phase of the methodology
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