Adam Hibberd
A colour contour plot showing direct missions to object 2014 UN271, otherwise known as ‘BB’ in honour of its discoverers Bernardinelli and Bernstein. This comet is huge (~ 135 km) and very distant, yet it turns out we can launch a mission.
The coloured bits represent viable direct missions to BB -in particular, the deep blue bits would be achievable by a sufficiently powerful launch vehicle. The blank areas represent infeasible combinations and occupy most of the plot. Note there are yearly opportunities up until a launch in around 2031.
If we are going to realise a direct mission to flyby BB, then it’ll have to have a combination of launch Date/Flight Duration in one of the coloured areas shown.
Alternatively, we could send a probe on an indirect trajectory as indicated by my animation, below. The software used to generate this was Optimum Interplanetary Trajectory Software (OITS) devised and created by me.
The paper, written by me and Marshall Eubanks, was published by the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, here. For the preprint go to arXiv, here, or otherwise refer to my ResearchGate profile here.
By the way my YouTube channel with lots of mission trajectory animations (including Project Lyra) can be found here.