Duality-Based Near-Fuel-Optimal Impulsive Trajectory Computation for Spacecraft Rendezvous Under Perturbations

What is it about?

Many space missions require controls of relative position and velocity vectors between spacecraft. This study solves nonlinear fuel-optimal impulsive trajectory optimization problems under severe perturbations. A strategy is adopted to improve the fidelity of the dynamics and the accuracy of the rendezvous constraints. To improve the computational efficiency, the proposed method applies the approximate analytical gradient of the constraint error norm during its error elimination process. It is expected that the method will be able to solve impulsive rendezvous problems much faster than other direct optimization approaches.

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