The announced missions to the Saturn and Jupiter systems renewed the space community interest in simple design methods for
gravity assist tours at planetary moons. A key element in such trajectories are the V-Infinity Leveraging Transfers (VILT)
which link simple impulsive maneuvers with two consecutive gravity assists at the same moon. VILTs typically include a tangent
impulsive maneuver close to an apse location, yielding to a desired change in the excess velocity relative to the moon. In
this paper we study the VILT solution space and derive a linear approximation which greatly simplifies the computation of
the transfers, and is amenable to broad global searches. Using this approximation, Tisserand graphs, and heuristic optimization
procedure we introduce a fast design method for multiple-VILT tours. We use this method to design a trajectory from a highly
eccentric orbit around Saturn to a 200-km science orbit at Enceladus. The trajectory is then recomputed removing the linear
approximation, showing a Δv change of <4%. The trajectory is 2.7 years long and comprises 52 gravity assists at Titan, Rhea, Dione, Tethys, and Enceladus,
and several deterministic maneuvers. Total Δv is only 445 m/s, including the Enceladus orbit insertion, almost 10 times better then the 3.9 km/s of the Enceladus orbit
insertion from the Titan–Enceladus Hohmann transfer. The new method and demonstrated results enable a new class of missions
that tour and ultimately orbit small mass moons. Such missions were previously considered infeasible due to flight time and
Δv constraints.
Keywords N-body - Resonance - Enceladus orbiter - VILT - Gravity assists - Artificial satellites