I was vaguely remembering an article about ESA considering a new mission to either Enceladus or Europa, and I felt like seeing when a flight to Enceladus could be done next.
Using TransX I found the next plausible opportunity to reach Saturn by way of Jupiter gravity assist is in early November of 2015. I tried flying this with a Delta Glider. Along the way, I found with TransX that there is also an option of gravity assisting past Saturn and reaching Neptune. I chose to try this, and was able to drop into an eccentric retrograde Neptune orbit, then plane change, synchronize, and ultimately get into a 100 km circular orbit around Triton on Sept. 1, 2028 with 12.7% fuel remaining.
A couple questions: I had to do a lot of midcourse corrections along the way. They were well within the DG's abilities - in fact prior to reaching Neptune I did them all with linear RCS, but I'd guess they'd be too much for a realistic spacecraft, especially if it needs to save most of its fuel to enter orbit at its destination. Is there a way to do better?
More realistic yet, I figure that most future missions will use a Cassini style flight path around the inner solar system before reaching Jupiter, instead of a much simpler Pioneer style flight like I did, but I have no idea how to plan such a mission. Is it possible to launch a few years earlier and end up in roughly the same flight path to Jupiter? Or did Cassini and Galileo take advantage of rare launch windows, like Voyager 2 did?
Using TransX I found the next plausible opportunity to reach Saturn by way of Jupiter gravity assist is in early November of 2015. I tried flying this with a Delta Glider. Along the way, I found with TransX that there is also an option of gravity assisting past Saturn and reaching Neptune. I chose to try this, and was able to drop into an eccentric retrograde Neptune orbit, then plane change, synchronize, and ultimately get into a 100 km circular orbit around Triton on Sept. 1, 2028 with 12.7% fuel remaining.
A couple questions: I had to do a lot of midcourse corrections along the way. They were well within the DG's abilities - in fact prior to reaching Neptune I did them all with linear RCS, but I'd guess they'd be too much for a realistic spacecraft, especially if it needs to save most of its fuel to enter orbit at its destination. Is there a way to do better?
More realistic yet, I figure that most future missions will use a Cassini style flight path around the inner solar system before reaching Jupiter, instead of a much simpler Pioneer style flight like I did, but I have no idea how to plan such a mission. Is it possible to launch a few years earlier and end up in roughly the same flight path to Jupiter? Or did Cassini and Galileo take advantage of rare launch windows, like Voyager 2 did?
