Low-Thrust Multi-Revolution Orbit Transfers

Sven Schäff ()
Additional contact information
Sven Schäff: Astos Solutions GmbH

A chapter in Space Engineering, 2016, pp 337-367 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter presents a procedure to solve low-thrust orbit transfer with many orbital revolutions. One typical application is a transfer from the Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO) to the Geosynchronous Equatorial Orbit (GEO). Many telecommunication satellites to be located in the GEO ring are placed into an intermediate transfer orbit like the GTO. Just recently these spacecrafts are equipped more often with electric propulsion (EP) systems for the transfer. With respect to state of the art chemical apogee kick engine, EP provides just a small amount of thrust. As a result, the transfer needs many weeks or months and involves many orbital revolutions around the central body. The spacecraft has to be steered properly to match transfer constraints such as the final orbit. An approach is presented to solve this type of orbit transfers. After introducing the required spacecraft dynamics, several astrodynamical aspects like perturbations and environment conditions are highlighted. A direct collocation method is proposed to solve the optimal control problem. Furthermore few practical applications are shown to demonstrate the capabilities of the mentioned strategy.

Keywords: Optimization models and methods; Astrodynamics; Low-thrust; Orbit transfer; Orbit-raising; Multi-revolution transfer; GTO-to-GEO; Trajectory optimization; Optimal control problem; Direct collocation; Nonlinear programming; Large-scale (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:spochp:978-3-319-41508-6_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319415086

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-41508-6_13

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Optimization and Its Applications from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().