This edition was organised by Zhong Zhang, Fanghua Jiang and Hexi Baoyin from Tsinghua University, School of Aerospace Engineering and Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering. The official competition web site can be found here. The problem was released on July 2023.
In a nutshell
The largest possible number of mining ships must be sent to the asteroid belt for a low-thrust multiple rendezvous mission. At their first visit to some asteroid, the ships deploy a miner, at the second visit they collect the mined resource. The number of ships that can be actually launched depend on the average collected material. The task is to return to Earth the maximum amount of mined material in the 15 years wide mission window assigned.
The files sent by the organizers to describe the problem are:
The winners
Led by Anastassios Petropoulos and Gregory Lantoine the team named Jet Propulsion Laboratory won the competition.
Workshop
The GTOC12 workshop has been announced and will take place on January 15, 2024. Contact the organizers in case you are planning to attend.
Post-competition
Immediately after the end of the competition the JPL team found the time to refine one more solution, one that averages almost 725kg per ship! Find the announcement below:
“Near the end of the GTOC12 competition, the JPL team was also working on a better 36-ship solution, but we ran out of time before finalizing it and decided to submit our 35-ship solution instead. A few months after the competition ended, we were finally able to find some free time and we were able to fully design our 36-ship solution!” – Gregory Lantoine 26-20-2023
Below are a few relevant comparisons:
| 35-ship solution (submitted) | 36-ship solution (post-competition) | |
| Number of ships | 35 | 36 |
| Number of asteroids | 313 | 320 |
| Number of Mars flybys | 0 | 1 (September 7, 2035) |
| Total collected mass | 25192.7 kg | 26062.6 kg |
| Average collected mass | 719.8 kg / ship | 724.0 kg / ship |
| Total weighted collected mass (score) | 22532.67 kg (89.44%) | 21904.51 kg (84.05%)(bonus coefficients at the end of competition) |
Antipodes solution
Starting from some of the best ships available from JPL solution and adding more with some ad-hoc strategy, the Antipodes obtained the following solutions to the problem:
Mass-optimal, mixed strategy (download):
39 ships, 356 asteroids
28975.1kg mass, 742.95kg/ship
24474.16kg weighted mass (84.47%)
Mass-optimal, self-cleaning only (download):
37 ships, 338 asteroids
27045.3kg mass, 730.95kg/ship
22847.92kg weighted mass (84.48%)
“The mixed solution contains a mixture of self-cleaning and mixed ships, with some parts coming from other teams: JPL group of 14 ships, modified to reach 752.62kg/ship average JPL group of 6 ships, modified to reach 735.54kg/ship average New group of 2 ships with 752.90kg/ship average, 17 new self-cleaning ships with 736.52kg/ship average.
The best self-cleaning ship we found visits 10 asteroids and returns 780.84kg of mined mass by itself. These solutions were generated over the months between the end of the GTOC 12 competition and the workshop and utilise a range of completely different strategies to those we used during the competition. “ (Jack Yarndley, the Antipodes, 2-04-2024)