Low-thrust orbit-raising trajectories considering eclipse constraints

Abstract

Many-revolution electric orbit-raising trajectories make numerous passages through the shadow of the Earth. The paper presents a new algorithm to determine the minimum-time trajectory of the spacecraft during orbit-raising. Standard two-body problem and cylindrical shadow model are assumed. The proposed methodology breaks the minimum-time orbit-raising problem into a series of optimization sub-problems, with each sub-problem attempting to maximize the proximity to the Geostationary orbit at the end of the time horizon. We present results for planar and non-planar orbit-raising scenarios and demonstrate the benefits of the algorithm.