An application of parallel computing in astrodynamics: Lambert's problem solution using MCPI algorithm

With the increasing interest in space exploration programs and using satellite networks, it is important to provide an accurate and rapid method that will provide the network control center with the information regarding the position and trajectory of each satellite in the network which will lead to an improvement in the routing decisions of the satellites. Lambert's problem is a boundary value problem that calculates the trajectory between two points in space and is continuously used for mission planning operations. Recent works suggest using the boundary value problems and initial value problems solver Chebyshev-Picard iteration method approximate the solution of Lambert's problem. Since our aim here is to provide a method that solves the problem rapidly, the Chebyshev- Picard iteration method serves our objective by providing a window to an execution in parallel environment. In this work, we implemented the parallel version of MCPI algorithm to solve Lambert's problem using Python's message passing library MPI4Py. We conducted the experiments to demonstrate the parallel scalability of the algorithm on both shared and distributed memory architectures. The experimental results show that the parallel algorithm achieves 10.07 and 3.83 times faster execution time on distributed memory and shared memory architectures, respectively.