Suwat Sreesawet and Atri Dutta (Aerospace Engineering) have authored a new paper entitled
"Fast and Robust Computation of Low-Thrust Orbit-Raising Trajectories", published
in the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, Vol. 41, No. 9 (2018), pp. 1888-1905. Here is the abstract of the paper:
"This paper presents a new dynamic model of a thrusting spacecraft, and the model
is used for computing low-thrust orbit-raising trajectories to the geosynchronous
equatorial orbit. Low-thrust orbit raising is a challenging problem, owing to numerous
revolutions and multiple eclipses encountered during the long transfer. The paper
also presents a mathematical framework that poses the orbit-raising problem as a sequence
of multiple unconstrained optimization subproblems, with each subproblem attempting
to minimize the deviation of the spacecraft’s orbit from geosynchronous equatorial
orbit at the end of one revolution. We demonstrate the application of the developed
framework through numerical examples corresponding to planar and nonplanar orbit-raising
scenarios. Simulation studies indicate that orbit-raising scenarios can be solved
quickly and demonstrate robust convergence, without requiring the need for any user-input
initial guess. This advantage is obtained at the cost of suboptimality of the generated
solutions, and an estimate of the optimality gap is provided by comparing the computed
solutions with those available in the literature."
