Summary of the 2nd Chinese Deep-Space Trajectory Design Competition

The 2nd Chinese Deep-Space Trajectory Design Competition is hosted by the Chinese society of theoretical and applied mechanics, the general establishment of space science and application, the Chinese academy of sciences, and the national key laboratory of astronautic dynamics, the China satellite measuring and control center in Xi’an. The competition notice is announced on Jan.1 2010, and we received more than 30 teams for registration. On Mar. 25 2010, the competition problem is disclosed, and the design solution submission is due on May 15 2010. The background of the design problem is multi-task and multi-target deep-space exploration – a spacecraft carrying a lander is to flyby multiple near-earth small bodies and release the lander at a proper date such that the lander can fly to Mars. Finally, we received 15 solutions designed by 15 different teams, and 12 solutions are deemed correct and the ranking of all these solutions is made public. The championship team is from the School of Aerospace, Tsinghua University, and the second and third places are awarded to the teams from the Department of Astronautics and Material Engineering, National University of Defense Technology and the Center for Space Science and Application, the Chinese Academy of Science, respectively. The other teams, such as the Department of Astronomy, Nanjing University and the Purple Mountain Observatory etc, are awarded victory prizes. This summary is to briefly present the competition problem, evaluation standard, design solutions by the 12 teams, and lessons learned from the competition.