Multidisciplinary Design Optimization of a Low-Thrust Asteroid Orbit Insertion Using Electric Propulsion

A team of researchers has published a paper detailing a novel multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) framework that tackles a critical challenge in deep-space mission planning: the complex coupling between a spacecraft's trajectory, its power system, and its electric propulsion performance. Traditional mission designs often rely on simplifying assumptions like constant thrust, which can lead to suboptimal or even infeasible plans, especially in environments with low solar irradiance like the asteroid belt. This new framework, built on the OpenMDAO and Dymos open-source toolchains, simultaneously optimizes all these subsystems as a single, time-optimal control problem, using a high-fidelity model of a real SPT-140 Hall thruster where performance is directly constrained by available solar power.

The technical approach employs a direct-transcription method via Dymos and solves the resulting nonlinear programming problem with the IPOPT solver, enabled by efficient gradient-based optimization from OpenMDAO's analytic derivatives. The team demonstrated its application on a mission to insert a spacecraft into orbit around asteroid 16-Psyche, a metal-rich target of high scientific interest. The results prove the framework's ability to capture essential trade-offs, showing that integrated power optimization is not just beneficial but critical for realistic electric propulsion mission design. This work represents a significant step toward more autonomous, AI-assisted engineering design for complex space systems, potentially reducing mission risk and development time for future exploratory missions to distant celestial bodies.