Low-thrust orbit-raising trajectories considering eclipse constraints
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Sreesawet, Suwat; Dutta, Atri. 2015. Low-thrust orbit-raising trajectories considering eclipse constraints. Advances in the Astronautical Sciences Spaceflight Mechanics, vol. 155:pp 1341-1355
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.