Optimal cooperative CubeSat maneuvers obtained through parallel computing

CubeSats, the class of small standardized satellites, are quickly becoming a prevalent scientific research tool. The desire to perform ambitious missions using multiple CubeSats will lead to innovations in thruster technology and will require new tools for the development of cooperative trajectory planning. To meet this need, a new software tool was created to compute propellant-minimizing maneuvers for two or more CubeSats. By including parallelization techniques, this tool is shown to run significantly faster than its serial counterpart.