Mission analysis for interplanetary Small-Sats, Support solutions for Martian Rovers’ navigation

During the last years, more and more space missions have been choosing Mars as target for their research missions. Many different Space Agencies from all over the world are organizing their resources to reach the Red Planet and unravel the aspects which remains still mysterious to our eyes. Missions like Mars Sample return and Perseverance are an example of the technological efforts we are taking in order to gather the highest amount of information about this world that, still now, represents a challenge on many levels and it could open ways we can barely imagine nowadays. For this very reason, the present thesis offers the reader a report of the research activity which has the goal to plan a mission based on the State of Art of Small-Sat technology. In order to prove the feasibility of this solution, the mission has been studied under many points of view and the part of said study reported in this paper is focused on the design of the operative orbits and the project of the propulsion system. In the first pages, it is possible to find a summary of the preliminary passages of the mission analysis to clarify the objectives and the constraints that are needed to be followed. After this part is ended, a trade-off analysis has been carried out to determine the most important aspects of the mission. The part of this report that concerns the design of the operative orbits and the definition of various potential scenarios has been carried out using the software STK by AGI. With the same methods and programming languages, it has been possible to analyse the answer of different classes of propulsion systems to choose and implement the most suitable one for the situation.