meetings - Space Flight Mechanics Committee

Venus in 2010, but now it is on the way to re-encounter Venus in 2015. However, due to a
malfunction of the propulsion system, AKATSUKI can be only injected into the orbit much
higher than that originally planned. It causes a couple of issues to be considered in its orbit
design, one of which is the long eclipse on the orbit around Venus. Introduced in this paper
is an orbit design strategy to avoid the long eclipse under this situation.
10:45 AAS Observations planning optimization for BepiColombo’s Mercury rotation
13-387 experiment
Alessandra Palli, University of Bologna; Rachele Meriggiola, University of Rome;
Luciano Iess, University of Rome; Paolo Tortora, University of Bologna
The identification of an observation planning ensuring the fulfillment of the scientific
objectives is fundamental in the frame of Mercury’s rotation experiment to be carried out by
ESA’s BepiColombo mission. The observables are represented by image pairs of the same
landmark on Mercury’s surface, captured at two different epochs via the on-board high
resolution camera. An end-to-end software simulator was implemented, including the
optimization module, to reproduce the expected experiment performance in real operations.
The accuracy returned by the rotational parameters estimation module represents the figure
of merit of each solution and drives the
11:05 AAS The Trajectory Control Strategies of Akatsuki for Venus Orbit Reinsertion
13-388 Chikako Hirose, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
The Japanese Venus explorer "Akatsuki (PLANET-C)", which now rotates about the Sun,
will approach to Venus again in 2015. For the Venus orbit re-insertion, several trajectory
strategies were devised. In this paper, we introduce the difficulties we faced in redesigning
the trajectory of Akatsuki after the failure of the first Venus Orbit Insertion (VOI) in 2010
and report some newly devised trajectory control strategies including Gravity Brake
Method, which will make the most of the solar perturbations to conduct the Venus orbit
insertion for the second time.
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23 rd AAS / AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting