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The preliminary mission design of spacecraft missions to asteroids ofteninvolves, in the early phases, the selection of candidate target asteroids. Thefinal result of such an analysis is a list of asteroids, ranked with respect tothe necessary propellant to be used, that the spacecraft could potentiallyreach. In this paper we investigate the sensitivity of the produced asteroidsrank to the employed trajectory model in the specific case of a smalllow-thrust propelled spacecraft beginning its journey from the Sun-Earth $L_2$Lagrangian point and heading to a rendezvous with some near-Earth asteroid. Weconsider five increasingly complex trajectory models: impulsive, Lambert,nuclear electric propulsion, nuclear electric propulsion including the Earth'sgravity, solar electric propulsion including the Earth's gravity and we studythe final correlation between the obtained target rankings. We find that theuse of a low-thrust trajectory model is of great importance for targetselection, since the use of chemical propulsion surrogates leads to favouringless attractive options 19\% of times, a percentage that drops to 8\% alreadyusing a simple nuclear electric propulsion model that neglects the Earth'sgravity effects and thrust dependence on the solar distance. We also find thatfor the study case considered, a small interplanetary CubeSat named M-ARGO, theinclusion of the Earth's gravity in the considered dynamics does not affect thetarget selection significantly.

Target selection for a small low-thrust mission to near-Earth asteroids