An Efficient Method to Design Premature End-of-Life Trajectories: A Hypothetical Alternate Fate for Cassini

What would happen if, hypothetically, the highly successful Cassini mission were to end prematurely due to lack of propellant or sudden subsystem failure? A solid plan to quickly produce a solution for any given scenario, regardless of where the spacecraft is along its reference path, must be in place to safely dispose of the spacecraft and meet all planetary protection requirements. As a contingency plan for this hypothetical situation, a method to design viable high-fidelity terminating trajectories based on a hybrid approach that exploits two-body and three-body flyby transfers combined with a numerical optimization scheme is detailed in this paper.