Cooperative Spacecraft Orbit Design for Small Body Exploration

To address the orbital design problem for cooperative observations with multiple spacecraft in small bodies exploration, this paper proposes an orbital design method that accounts for cooperative observation effectiveness, given the primary spacecraft’s orbital parameters and observation schedule. First, to accurately compute the visible regions on the small body surface, we develop a polyhedral equal-solid-angle resampling scheme based on the Hierarchical Equal Area iso-Latitude Pixelization (HEALPix), thereby constructing a pixel-based surface grid of the small body. Then, by taking the cooperative observed area ratio and the mean instantaneous field-of-view overlap ratio as effectiveness metrics, and the maneuver ΔV as a constraint, we formulate an optimization-based search strategy to solve for the optimal orbital configuration parameters within the search space. Numerical simulations show that the proposed method produces near-circular, non-coplanar configurations that satisfy both propellant use constraints and cooperative observation requirements, providing a useful reference for engineering design.