Fast and Accurate Simulation of Gravitational Field of Irregular-shaped Bodies using Polydisperse Sphere Packings

Abstract

Currently, interest in space missions to small bodies (e.g., asteroids) is increasing, both scientifically and commercially. One of the important aspects of these missions is to test the navigation, guidance, and control algorithms. The most cost and time efficient way to do this is to simulate the missions in virtual testbeds. To do so, a physically-based simulation of the small bodies' physical properties is essential. One of the most important physical properties, especially for landing operations, is the gravitational field, which can be quite irregular, depending on the shape and mass distribution of the body. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to simulate gravitational fields for small bodies like asteroids. The main idea is to represent the small body's mass by a polydisperse sphere packing. This allows for an easy and efficient parallelization. Our GPU-based implementation outperforms traditional methods by more than two orders of magnitude while achieving a similar accuracy.