SCIENCE-DRIVEN DESIGN OF ENCELADUS FLYBY GEOMETRY

The Cassini-Huygens mission has discovered an active cryovolcanic south polar region on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. In response, new trajectory design techniques have been developed to optimize Enceladus flybys to maximize science return. This paper reviews the Enceladus flybys performed by the Cassini spacecraft to date, defines the different classes of flyby geometries, and develops analytic expressions to solve for and target the best geometry associated with both in situ and remote sensing instruments. These techniques were implemented to modify and improve Enceladus science return during the Cassini prime mission, and will be used to optimize Enceladus flyby geometry in the Cassini extended mission. While these techniques were developed for, and applied to Enceladus flybys, they can generically be applied to any hyperbolic satellite flyby given a region of interest.