In the summer of 2002, NASA began the task of renovating its low thrust trajectory analysis capability to provide a set of tools that can provide consistent results and be widely available for both proposers and reviewers. At the time, tool distribution was very limited, required considerable tool specific expertise to obtain good solutions, often required good initial guess to achieve convergence, and generally only performed two-body analyses. The objective of the LTTT effort was to provide a set of tools with an increased ease of use, robust convergence, higher fidelity analyses, and be well documented for consistent results.
Because there is no single tool appropriate for all missions, a team of experts within NASA, academia, and industry was established to develop the Low-Thrust Trajectory Tool Suite as an update to the legacy Chebytop and VARITOP derived tools. In March of 2006, the ISPT project released its first version of the LTTT suite including the optimization tools MALTO, Copernicus, OTIS, and Mystic and the propagator SNAP. The tools have since received many updates and are used throughout industry and NASA |
