Interplanetary Small-Satellite Missions: Ballistic Problems and Their Solutions1

The past decade has been marked by an explosive growth in the number of missions with the use of small spacecraft weighing only about tens of kilograms, including CubeSats that are currently widely employed in various applications. For a scientific paper, it is no longer feasible to enumerate and properly analyze the accomplished missions as well as those under development and being planned: information changes so quickly that perhaps only websites with inline renovations can keep track of all the changes in this market. Near-Earth missions of CubeSats increasingly become the prerogative of engineers and production managers. Nowadays, even factories are built to mass-produce small spacecraft. However, interplanetary small-spacecraft missions stand apart because the technologies used to develop large spacecraft for interplanetary missions are not fully applicable to small spacecraft. The same is true of the ballistic aspects of such missions. This is primarily due to the low energy capability of small spacecraft for maneuvering and transmitting signals over long distances. The other equally important aspects are their self-sufficiency, navigation support, and radiation resistance in outer space. From the standpoint of the scientific novelty of the problems that spacecraft have to face and the fundamentals of ballistic implementation, it is interplanetary missions that attract attention of researchers. This paper discusses the opportunities for interplanetary transportation of small spacecraft and formulates the problems that need to be solved in the near future.