U.S.-Germany Cooperative Research: The Design of Spacecraft Trajectories

9910027 Mischaikow This award supports Konstantin Mischaikow and students from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and participants from the Jet Propulsion Lab and the California Institute of Technology in a collaboration with Michael Dellnitz of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Sciences at the University of Paderborn, Germany. The collaboration will develop new efficient numerical methods which allow for the reliable approximation of invariant manifolds and the rigorous verification of desired trajectories for spacecraft. Among the objectives of the research are the development of a set-oriented algorithm for the computation of rigorous coverings of invariant manifolds Hamiltonian systems; development of techniques for the real-time visualization of the computed objects; and incorporation of the developed techniques into the software tools already developed at Paderborn and the Jet Propulsion Lab.