What is GTOC ?
The Global Trajectory Optimization Competition is an event taking place every one-two years over roughly one month during which the best aerospace engineers and mathematicians world wide challenge themselves to solve a “nearly-impossible” problem of interplanetary trajectory design.
10th Global Trajectory Optimization Competition
The 10th edition of GTOC was organised by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Outer Planets Mission Analysis Group.
Official competition web site can be found here. In a nutshell, theme for 10th edition was “settler of the galaxy”. Three types of interstellar generational vessels are imagined to be sent around the Milky Way to spread the human race throughout the galaxy in a quest 90 Myr long.
Abstract of our approach
An exploratory analysis was carried on the stars at first to understand the variation of star systems with position, polar angle and time. This analysis provided us with the insight to explore the galactic space. With three types of interstellar vessels each of them were formulated with different strategy to explore. The fast ships being capable of providing maximum ΔV they are used to explore the edges of the galaxy. While mother ships having up to three ΔVs they are used to form the backbone of settler ships in a spacially symmetrically formation. Finally, the settler ships are being actually responsible for formation of chain of settled stars.
Results
Nearly 3000 stars are being settled at the end of 13 generations. The merit function 𝐽 reaches to about 150.
To understand our approach in detail : https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.00226
Find code on github at : Settlers of Galaxy