Anton de Ruiter
Associate Professor
Department of Aerospace Engineering
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

Space exploration missions are limited by the propellant available to execute maneuvers, correct trajectories and station-keep. Reducing the propellant required, can lead to longer space exploration mission lifetimes and ranges. Alternatively, replacing some propellant with more scientific instruments would yield greater scientific return. A key to reducing the propellant required is to design space missions that exploit the natural dynamics. The past decades have seen significant research in this direction, leading to novel low-energy trajectory design methods based on dynamical systems theory, opening up a whole new class of possible space exploration missions. This is still an expanding area of research, incorporating newer technologies such as solar-electric propulsion and solar sails. This seminar will primarily focus on missions around irregular bodies such as asteroids. In these regimes, the orbital and attitude dynamics are significantly more coupled than in regimes near spherical bodies such as planets, providing the possibility of using the spacecraft’s attitude to affect the orbital trajectory. A suitable gravitational model will be presented, as well as analysis to understand how the gravitational force varies with a spacecraft’s attitude, and how this can be exploited to modify the orbital trajectory. Future research directions will also be discussed.

About the Speaker...

Anton H.J. de Ruiter is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in the department of Aerospace Engineering at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. He received the Ph.D. degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2005. Between 2006 and 2008 he was a visiting research fellow at the Canadian Space Agency in Montreal, and an assistant professor in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Carleton University from 2009 to 2012. His current research interests are in the area of space systems, astrodynamics, space robotics and space mission design. He serves as Editor-In-Chief of the Proceedings of the IMechE, Part G: Journal of Aerospace Engineering, and as Associate Editor in the area of space systems for the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. He is the primary author of the book “Spacecraft Dynamics and Control: An Introduction”, published in January 2013 by John Wiley and Sons, which is used as course and reference text at a number of universities around the world. He has published his research findings in 62 journal articles.