Mission to Europa: Case Study of a Manned Mission to Europa

Europa being the most intriguing satellite in our solar system has always fetched scientists' and explorers' attention because of its Earth-like water ocean underlying a relatively thin ice sheet. In fact, Europa has been the foundation of many science fiction works including the most famous one 2001 and 2010. The known fact that Europa may harbor oceans also makes it the most likely candidate to harbor extraterrestrial life. This project aims at mission planning for a manned reconnaissance mission to this Jovian moon for investigation of its oceans and its habitability. This not only included a trajectory analysis to Europa and back but also finding an optimal trajectory as would suit to human factors and requisites. An optimal trajectory in this context is the one which caters for the need of minimum possible mission time as well as a balance of ?V budget which in turn accounts for the amount of fuel to be carried, the payload constraints, and size of the spacecraft. This required the project to consist of Orbital Analysis and Mass Analysis. For this analysis, the whole mission has been divided into four phases for trajectory optimization. This requires a number of iterations in the launch date, orbital parameters, and mass of the components and more iteration within them. The Pork Chop plots have been plotted to show the relation between the selected launch date, C3, arrival date, and arrival velocity suiting to requirements of Time-frame, Hyperbolic Excess Energy, and arrival velocity matching for lower fuel consumption. Starting from the year 2027, the project has shown analysis and optimization of the time, trajectory and ?V trade-off to account for a 1425- day return mission to the icy moon Europa. The launcher and instrumentations are assumed as per the state of the art in 2027. So, from the launch to the eventual splash down, this project within its four phases discusses the calculations and constraints required to come up with the results of the trajectory. These are based upon the interplanetary trajectory calculations and have also been verified for results from trajectory calculation software. We hope that this book will help aerospace enthusiasts who are interested in a mission to Europa.