Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

New and proposed missions for approaching moons, and particularly icy moons, increasingly require the design of trajectories within challenging multi-body environments that stress or exceed the capabilities of the two-body design methodologies typically used over the last several decades. These current methods encounter difficulties because they often require appreciable user interaction, result in trajectories that require significant amounts of propellant, or miss potential mission-enabling options. The use of dynamical systems methods applied to three-body and multi-body models provides a pathway to obtain a fuller theoretical understanding of the problem that can then result in significant improvements to trajectory design in each of these areas. The search for approach trajectories within highly nonlinear, chaotic regimes where multi-body effects dominate becomes increasingly complex, especially when landing, orbiting, or flyby scenarios must be considered in the analysis. In the case of icy moons, approach trajectories must also be tied into the broader tour which includes flybys of other moons. The tour endgame typically includes the last several flybys, or resonances, before the final approach to the moon, and these resonances further constrain the type of approach that may be used.

In this seminar, new methods for approaching moons by traversing the chaotic regions near the Lagrange point gateways will be discussed for several examples. The emphasis will be on landing trajectories approaching Europa including a global analysis of trajectories approaching any point on the surface and analyses for specific landing scenarios across a range of different energies. The constraints on the approach from the tour within the context of the endgame strategy will be given for a variety of different moons and scenarios. Specific approaches using quasiperiodic or Lissajous orbits will be shown, and general landing and orbit insertion trajectories will be placed into context relative to the invariant manifolds of unstable periodic and quasiperiodic orbits. These methods will be discussed and applied for the specific example of the Europa Lander mission concept. The Europa Lander mission concept is particularly challenging in that it requires the redesign of the approach scenario after the spacecraft has launched to accommodate landing at a wide range of potential locations on the surface. The final location would be selected based on reconnaissance from the Europa Clipper data once Europa Lander is in route. Taken as a whole, these methods will provide avenues to find both fundamentally new approach pathways and reduce cost to enable new missions.

One of the characteristics observed in real networks is that, as a network's topology evolves so does the network's ability to perform various complex tasks. To explain this, it has also been observed that as a network grows certain subnetworks begin to specialize the function(s) they perform. We introduce a model of network growth based on this notion of specialization and show that as a network is specialized its topology becomes increasingly modular, hierarchical, and sparser, each of which are properties observed in real networks. This model is also highly flexible in that a network can be specialized over any subset of its components. By selecting these components in various ways we find that a network's topology acquires some of the most well-known properties of real networks including the small-world property, disassortativity, power-law like degree distributions and clustering coefficients. This growth model also maintains the basic spectral properties of a network, i.e. the eigenvalues and eigenvectors associated with the network's adjacency network. This allows us in turn to show that a network maintains certain dynamic properties as the network's topology becomes increasingly complex due to specialization.

We will discuss the regularity of the conjugacy between an Anosov automorphism L of a torus and its small perturbation. We assume that L has no more than two eigenvalues of the same modulus and that L^4 is irreducible over rationals. We consider a volume-preserving C^1-small perturbation f of L. We show that if the Lyapunov exponents of f with respect to the volume are the same as the Lyapunov exponents of L, then f is C^1+ conjugate to L. Further, we establish a similar result for irreducible partially hyperbolic automorphisms with two-dimensional center bundle. This is joint work with Andrey Gogolev and Victoria Sadovskaya