Description: This project explores the mathematical methods and results of designing a mission to land a spacecraft on the asteroid Ceres by beginning in an earth-centered LEO orbit and ending in an orbit prepared to land on the surface of the asteroid. Rather than assume instantaneous velocity changes, course-correcting burns of finite time are considered and analyzed using numerical methods and Matlab computation. The behavior of the spacecraft is observed inside the Earth s sphere of influence, in interplanetary space, and inside Ceres sphere of influence.
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File list (Check if you may need any files):
elem2rv.m
project.m
rv2elem.m
thruster_burn.m
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