Aerobraking mission design - Mission domain and mass performance

The work reported comprises part of an Aerobraking Study that sought to establish a 'feasible mission design, navigation design, and MOS design and to show the desirability of aerobraking for the Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar (VOIR) mission by assessing mission performance, cost, and risk'. The developed software assesses accurately the mass performance of aerobraking and chemical missions that place a spacecraft in orbit about another planet. All injection date/arrival data combinations that provide a trajectory with adequate mass performance are available for further study. The considered analysis has been applied to the Type I trajectories from earth to Venus in 1988. The analysis can easily be applied to missions to Mars and to Titan. The intersection of the determined mass performance domain with the stable orbit domain provides an adequate mission domain for VOIR 1988.