[GTOC 9] - A hell of a race is ended!

[Dario Izzo]

Dear Fellow Scientists,

I watched with excitement the last hours of the Kessler Run, witnessing the incredible improvements of Tshingua-Lad, NUDT, XSCC-ADL, Strathclyde++ as they tried to challenge JPL and overtake each-other. Now the submission system is closed (after a final DNS attack that I am sure sent some people at JPL to the hospital I had to reopen the system for extra 10 minutes as the server malfunctioned) and so is the competition (I will miss it!). .

Congratulations to Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Outer Planets Mission Analysis Group for a clear victory and an amazing trajectory we are all keen to hear more about. It is a well deserved achievement, also considering that the Earth with its J2 its hardly an outer planet ;)

But most of all, let me deeply thank you all for having spent the time to "play" in this event using your time to solve a riddle of a great complexity. Thanks to the many outsiders that tried and managed to submit solutions (wow you did a great job!), to the single named teams that were able to tackle the problem and open the way to more elaborated solutions, to the funny tweets and discussions and overall to a whole worldwide community that proved to possess just the type of spirit I appreciate the most. 

 I hope we all have learned something that will be of help in the upcoming GTOCless year.

 I know I will not be able to meet you all in Japan, but I will try to post online as much material as possible.

Thank you all once again .....

Dario

[Petropoulos, Anastassios E (392M)]

Dear Dario,

Thank you for putting on a fantastic GTOC competition, not only in the problem posed (it's OK that it was not an outer planet!), but also in the organisational aspects.  The last minute server glitch did make us very nervous!  No hospital visits, but certainly some sweating.

The other teams in the competition had us on our toes the whole competition, thanks of course to their acumen, but also to the leaderboard concept that you set up.  This made it enjoyable for people outside our profession to follow as well, and made considerable headway in increasing interest in trajectory optimisation.

This year's problem we found to be exciting and challenging, and also amenable to team work.

We are excitedly looking forward to seeing you and many of the other teams at the workshop and hearing about the variety of methods that were used to tackle the problem.

-Anastassios and Dan

for the JPL team

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