Earth-Mars trajectory
Capture at Mars to Deimos's orbit
Deimos-to-Phobos transfer
These trajectories to and around Mars were designed for UCLA's Spring 2017 Spacecraft Design course (161C). The class was taught by Dr. Dan Goebel from JPL. My group's mission consists of taking scientific measurements around Deimos (the outer moon), dropping a lander there, then proceeding to Phobos (the inner moon). I designed the trajectories to make this happen by taking orbit data from the
SPICE toolkit and using MATLAB's built-in ODE solver ode23. Electric propulsion was chosen over chemical propulsion after conducting a trade study and the 25cm XIPS thruster was subsequently chosen (though the NSTAR would have been slightly better in terms of minimizing launch mass).
This is the mission timeline (1.85 years total).
The launch vehicle is a Falcon 9 Full Thrust and this is the mass breakdown.
Thanks to Nick Brown, Brandon Busbee, Justin Fedasko, Vibhav Gaur, Sunderlin Jackon, and Alvaro Pons Pelufo for making this such a fun group project.
Bonus gif
