Influence of the Mercury gravity field on the orbit insertion strategy of BepiColombo

In this paper the Mercury orbit insertion (MOI) in January 2022 of the ESA mission BepiColombo consisting of 15 manoeuvres is optimised. To maximise the mass in the target orbit, the gravity losses of the 15 burns are minimised by distributing the burns as evenly as possible. However, severe Sun aspect angle constraints make the optimisation problem difficult to solve. The NLP-solver SNOPT is used for the optimisation.