As NASA examines potential missions in the post space shuttle era, there has been a renewed interest in low-thrust electric propulsion for both crewed and uncrewed missions. While much progress has been made in the field of software for the optimization of low-thrust trajectories, many of the tools utilize higher-fidelity methods which, while excellent, result in extremely high run-times and poor convergence when dealing with planetocentric spiraling trajectories deep within a gravity well. Conversely, faster tools like SEPSPOT provide a reasonable solution but typically fail to account for other forces such as third-body gravitation, aerodynamic drag, solar radiation pressure. SEPSPOT is further constrained by its solution method, which may require a very good guess to yield a converged optimal solution. Here the authors have developed an approach using collocation intended to provide solution times comparable to those given by SEPSPOT while allowing for greater robustness and extensible force models.


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    Title :

    Optimization of Low-Thrust Spiral Trajectories by Collocation


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2012


    Size :

    24 pages


    Type of media :

    Report


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




    Optimization of Low-Thrust Spiral Trajectories by Collocation

    Falck, Robert D. / Dankanich, John W. | NTRS | 2012


    Optimization of Low-Thrust Spiral Trajectories by Collocation

    Falck, Robert / Dankanich, John | AIAA | 2012


    Optimization of Low-Thrust Spiral Trajectories by Collocation

    Falck, R. / Dankanich, J. / American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; American Astronautical Society | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2012