Target selection for asteroid mining mission based on Optimal trajectory design

Near-Earth Asteroids are attractive targets in terms of the mineral resources they can provide us and the fast technological development and growing human needs for rare metals and minerals. In this paper, Ryugu, Itokawa, and Bennu asteroids are selected from near-Earth asteroids due to their proper distance from Earth to design the optimal round-trip trajectory. Multi-objective optimization along with the ephemeris of these asteroids is used to design outbound and inbound trajectories. The objective functions include the total delta-velocity and the total duration of the mission, these variables are minimized with the help of the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm for the trajectories between the Earth and the sample asteroids. In the following, the results are presented in the form of Pareto diagrams. which indicates the suitability of the conditions of Bennu asteroid compared to other sample asteroids. To validate these results, the Pareto diagram answers that had the least delta-velocity were compared with their counterparts from the available information on the NASA JPL data center.