Winning trajectory

ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team has received a prestigious ‘Humie’ award for their use of ‘evolutionary computation’ to evolve this spacecraft trajectory around Jupiter’s Galilean moons, achieving an efficiency beyond the best human efforts. This optimal trajectory was 'bred' to survey the Galilean moons, using the smallest quantities of spacecraft propellant to image as much of their terrain as swiftly as possible – an important point because of the hostile radiation belts that surround Jupiter.