On October 13, 2012, the Fourth National Space Orbit Design Competition Seminar was held in Beijing. The result submitted by the Planetary Science and Deep Space Exploration Laboratory team from Purple Mountain Observatory won the second place.

This competition was based on the background of multi-tasking and multi-target exploration of the small bodies in solar system. By designing optimal control strategy and the flight path, the final result will realize the exploration of Near-Earth asteroid, main belt asteroids, and comets with limited thrust or pulse thrust. The exploration terms include fly-by, impact, rendezvous and sample-return, which involve low-thrust trajectory optimization, gravity-assist technology, and global optimization strategies. All of these put forward higher requirements to the the orbit design level of the contestants. The competition notice issued in May 2012, and announced the contest topic on June 10. In total there are 26 teams take part the competition and the 14 teams submitted the results.

In this seminar, Many orbit design experts from the domestic aerospace sectors and teams representatives carried out depth academic exchanges and discussions on space orbit design issues, and achieved fruitful results.

The seminar is co-sponsored by the Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Space Applications Engineering and Technology Center, Space Flight Dynamics Technology Laboratory of National Defense Science and Technology University.