Choose Europa, Ganymede, Titan, Enceladus or Triton, and design the whole trip — launch pad to touchdown.
This is the project the whole course has been building towards. Pick one moon of an outer planet and design a mission that lands on it. You will need everything: a launch window from real ephemerides, a gravity-assist route to the planet, an insertion that a moon flyby makes cheaper, a tour that pumps the orbit down and lowers the arrival speed at your moon, an orbit around the moon that the planet's tide will not destroy, and a descent — powered or through an atmosphere — that ends at walking pace on the surface. Then add up the Δv and the propellant, and say honestly where your design is weakest.
Launch windows with gravity assistsMoon-assisted orbit insertionResonant moon tours and Tisserand graphsThree-body orbit stabilityPowered descent or atmospheric entryEnd-to-end Δv and mass budgets
Objective
Deliver a lander of 1,000 kg dry mass (including its descent propulsion hardware but not its propellant) to the surface of one of Europa, Ganymede, Titan, Enceladus or Triton, launched between 2030 and 2040 on a launcher that can give C₃ ≤ 30 km²/s² to your full spacecraft mass. Chemical propulsion at Isp 320 s throughout, unless you justify solar-electric propulsion for your target.
Acceptance criteria
0/8
Workspace
Deliverables
•A module with the five functions above (or your own structure) and a script that runs the whole design and prints each check.
•A mission table: dates, Δv per phase, propellant per phase, mass at each stage, margins.
•Figures: the heliocentric trajectory, the tour on a Tisserand graph or as orbit plots, the moon-orbit eccentricity history, and the descent profile.
•The critique.
Stretch goals
•Compare two targets (for example Europa and Titan) with the same lander: which costs less to reach, and why?
•Replace the propulsive planet insertion with aerocapture at Titan, Uranus or Neptune and estimate the mass saved.
•Add Jupiter's radiation: estimate the time your tour spends inside 15 R_J and redesign it to halve that.
•Design the return: a sample-return ascent from your moon and the Δv to get back to Earth.