TY - JOUR
T1 - Line Sampling Procedure for Extensive Planetary Protection Analysis
AU - Romano, Matteo
AU - Colombo, Camilla
AU - Pérez, José Manuel Sánchez
N1 - Funding Information:
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme as part of project COMPASS (Grant agreement No 679086), and from the European Space Agency (ESA) though a Networking/Partnering Initiative (NPI) agreement.
Funding Information:
Open access funding provided by Politecnico di Milano within the CRUI-CARE Agreement.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s).
PY - 2022/12
Y1 - 2022/12
N2 - Exploration missions to other planets have to satisfy planetary protection requirements to limit the probability of impacts between mission-related objects and celestial bodies, with the goal of reducing the risk of contaminating them with biological material coming from Earth. The verification of these requirements can become a lengthy and computationally expensive task when addressed with common methods such as Monte Carlo simulations, as they involve analysing the interplanetary trajectories and the uncertainties associated with them for time spans up to 100 years, and estimating small probabilities with strict confidence levels. This paper presents novel improvements of the line sampling method, already introduced for the verification of planetary protection requirements as a way to estimate the impact probabilities more efficiently and with greater accuracy than achieved with standard Monte Carlo. These newly developed techniques are presented, with the aim of making the analysis with Line Sampling more effective, and providing more information about the distribution of impacts in the initial uncertainty distribution: an algorithm to identify the time intervals where most close approaches are clustered, and an algorithm to improve the determination of the main sampling direction and increase the accuracy of the probability estimation.
AB - Exploration missions to other planets have to satisfy planetary protection requirements to limit the probability of impacts between mission-related objects and celestial bodies, with the goal of reducing the risk of contaminating them with biological material coming from Earth. The verification of these requirements can become a lengthy and computationally expensive task when addressed with common methods such as Monte Carlo simulations, as they involve analysing the interplanetary trajectories and the uncertainties associated with them for time spans up to 100 years, and estimating small probabilities with strict confidence levels. This paper presents novel improvements of the line sampling method, already introduced for the verification of planetary protection requirements as a way to estimate the impact probabilities more efficiently and with greater accuracy than achieved with standard Monte Carlo. These newly developed techniques are presented, with the aim of making the analysis with Line Sampling more effective, and providing more information about the distribution of impacts in the initial uncertainty distribution: an algorithm to identify the time intervals where most close approaches are clustered, and an algorithm to improve the determination of the main sampling direction and increase the accuracy of the probability estimation.
KW - Interplanetary missions
KW - Line sampling
KW - Monte Carlo
KW - Planetary protection
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85143169599&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s40295-022-00341-z
DO - 10.1007/s40295-022-00341-z
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85143169599
SN - 0021-9142
VL - 69
SP - 1537
EP - 1572
JO - Journal of the Astronautical Sciences
JF - Journal of the Astronautical Sciences
IS - 6
ER -