Target Pre-screening Method for Asteroid Exploration Based on Minimum Orbital Intersection Distance

Asteroid exploration helps to study important scientific issues such as the evolution of the solar system, and the implementation of asteroid exploration during the transfer of deep space missions can increase scientific returns. Aiming at the problem of large calculation amount and low efficiency in the primary selection of asteroid exploration targets directly through orbit recursion, a target pre-screening method based on the minimum orbital intersection distance is proposed. After the formula for calculating minimum orbital intersection distance for hyperbolic orbit is derived, the theory is applied to the screening of asteroid exploration targets. Firstly, based on the shape and spatial position of the orbits of the probe and the asteroids, the geometric closest distances between their orbits are calculated, and the asteroid targets that may meet the approach distance criteria are pre-screened. Then, based on the orbit recursive model, the target asteroids whose real closest distance to the probe is less than approach distance criteria are selected. The simulation results show that this pre-screening method based on the minimum orbital intersection distance can effectively reduce the amount of calculation and reduce the calculation time, thus improving the efficiency of asteroid target determination.