Investigating Adaptive Trajectories to Explore Water Plumes on Icy Moons

This thesis investigates different means of introducing autonomy into designing spacecraft trajectories by surveying 4 different adaptive trajectories. This is done using established algorithms within path planning and robotics, implementing trajectories based on splines and greedy algorithms. The survey is based on real planetary data letting the spacecraft fly through the water plumes on Enceladus. These plumes are constructed using analytical models of the water plumes that have been fitted to Cassini measurements. A mission designed at probing these plumes at an altitude as low as 5 km is studied as a test scenario for the adaptive trajectories. It is found that the adaptive trajectories increase the science return at lower altitudes, both in exploring the terrain and sampling the plume material.