The  PWG MASSE would like to combine several established concepts with future trends in GNC and Solar System exploration to define a simple but robust and scalable mission architecture to simultaneously explore diverse and unknown targets in the Solar System.

The main objectives of the MASSE study are:

  • Generating a robust system design that can cope with multiple target scenarios.
  • Have a flexible but reliable GNC system for flyby trajectories with unknown bodies.
  • Target selection and trajectory optimization of multi-target tours.
  • Design of general solutions that target asteroid exploration.
  • Development of accurate mathematical description of the spacecraft dynamics around irregular objects in a flexible framework to deal with unknown environments including binary systems.

See the project presentation for more details.