Georgia Institute of Technology
GPU-assisted search for Jupiter-Ganymede to Jupiter-Europa resonance transfers in a restricted 4-body model
The phenomenon of mean-motion resonance overlapping is known to be crucial for the generation of large-scale chaos and global instability in celestial systems. This instability in turn can be profitably leveraged for the purposes of low-energy space mission trajectory design. Indeed, prior studies have used the stable and unstable manifolds of resonant periodic orbits for mission design in the Jupiter-Europa (Anderson and Lo, 2011) and Saturn-Titan (Vaquero, 2013) planar CRTBP systems. In most prior work, including the aforementioned two studies, connections were found between orbits resonant with the same moon; however, both Jupiter and Saturn have multiple moons, each having their own set of mean motion resonances.
This study will present some preliminary results from a search for trajectories between orbits resonant with different Jovian moons, namely Ganymede and Europa. For this, the appropriate model to use is a concentric circular restricted 4-body model; hence, unstable mean-motion resonant orbits correspond to 2D tori in a 5D extended phase space. After computing these tori and their manifolds, we use GPU-assisted tools inspired by collision detection algorithms from computer graphics to rapidly find approximate intersections of Jupiter-Ganymede and Jupiter-Europa resonant orbit manifolds. We demonstrate a variety of low-cost transfer options from various Jupiter-Ganymede resonances to the 3:4 Jupiter-Europa resonance, which is known to be a key step on the pathway to the libration points and surface of Europa.
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GPU-assisted search for Jupiter-Ganymede to Jupiter-Europa resonance transfers in a restricted 4-body model
