Rapid GPU-Assisted Search and Parameterization-Based Refinement and Continuation of Connections between Tori in Periodically Perturbed Planar Circular Restricted 3-Body Problems

Abstract: When the planar circular restricted 3-body problem (PCRTBP) is periodically perturbed, as occurs in many useful astrodynamics models, most unstable periodic orbits persist as whiskered tori. Intersections between stable and unstable manifolds of such tori provide natural heteroclinic pathways enabling spacecraft to greatly modify their orbits without using propellant. However, the 2D Poincar\'e sections used in PCRTBP studies no longer work to find these intersections. Thus, in this study, we develop new fast methods to search for and compute such heteroclinics. First, the dynamics are used to restrict the intersection search to only certain manifold subsets, greatly reducing the required computational effort. Next, we present a massively parallel procedure for carrying out this search by representing the manifolds as discrete meshes and adapting methods from computer graphics collision detection algorithms. Implementing the method in Julia and OpenCL, we obtain a 5-7x speedup by leveraging GPUs versus CPU-only execution. Finally, we show how to use manifold parameterizations to refine the approximate intersections found in the mesh search to very high accuracy, as well as to numerically continue the connections through families of tori; the families' Whitney differentiability enables interpolation of needed parameterizations. The ability to very rapidly find a heteroclinic intersection between tori of fixed frequencies thus allows the systematic exploration of intersections for tori of nearby frequencies as well, yielding a variety of potential zero-fuel spacecraft trajectories. We demonstrate the tools on the Jupiter-Europa planar elliptic RTBP.