Earth-to-Mars Interplanetary Pork Chop Plots

A MATLAB Script for Creating Pork Chop Plots of Ballistic Earth-to-Mars Trajectories

PDF document and MATLAB script that can be used to create and plot interplanetary “pork chop” plots for Type I and Type II Earth-to-Mars trajectories. These plots illustrate the behavior of launch energy (C3L), right ascension (RLA) and declination (DLA) of the departure hyperbola, time-of-flight, and arrival v-infinity, DLA and RLA for a range of user-defined launch and arrival calendar dates.

The data required for these contour plots is created by solving the heliocentric, two-body “patched-conic” Lambert problem. A patched-conic trajectory ignores the gravitational effect of both the launch and arrivals planets on the heliocentric trajectory. Pork chop plots are typically used for preliminary mission analysis.