GTOC 11 – Dyson sphere

This edition was organised by Ya-zhong Luo and Hong-Xin Shen from  College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology and  State Key Laboratory of Astronautic Dynamics, Xi’an Satellite Control Center. The official competition web site can be found here.

In a nutshell

Twelve stations placed in a to-be-found Dyson ring were tasked to build the mega-structure. Ten spacecraft starting from the Earth had to tour the asteroid belt to activate as many asteroids as possible using a minimal propellant consumption. Each activated asteroid had to complete a low-thrust, constant acceleration spiral aimed at reaching a chosen target station repleneshing its building material.

The files sent by the organizers to describe the problem are:

  1. Problem statement (final)
  2. Problem data: candidate_asteroids.txt
  3. Example Solution

The winners

Led by Zhong Zhang and Haiyang Li the team named TsinghuaLAD&509 (Tsinghua University, School of Aerospace Engineering and Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering) won the competition.

All the asteroid low-thrust trajectories of the winning solution.

The workshop

The workshop on this competition took take place in December 2021, following this announcement.

All presentations can be downloaded here.

Curiosities

The competition ended on the 7th of November, which also was the same day in which the problem was released back in 2005 for the first edition of the GTOC series. In that first edition a team from Tsinghua University, School of Aerospace Engineering, who won this edition, participated ranking last.

NOTE:

Most teams published a paper in the journal Journal Acta Astronautica detailing the results of the competition.