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Global Search Capabilities of Indirect Methods for Impulsive Transfers

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Abstract

An optimization method which combines an indirect method with homotopic approach is proposed and applied to impulsive trajectories. Minimum-fuel, multiple-impulse solutions, with either fixed or open time are obtained. The homotopic approach at hand is relatively straightforward to implement and does not require an initial guess of adjoints, unlike previous adjoints estimation methods. A multiple-revolution Lambert solver is used to find multiple starting solutions for the homotopic procedure; this approach can guarantee to obtain multiple local solutions without relying on the user’s intuition, thus efficiently exploring the solution space to find the global optimum. The indirect/homotopic approach proves to be quite effective and efficient in finding optimal solutions, and outperforms the joint use of evolutionary algorithms and deterministic methods in the test cases.

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Acknowledgments

The third author would like to thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 11222215), the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-13-0159), and the Project supported by Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (13JJ1001) for their support to this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Astronautic Dynamics (ADL), Xi’an Satellite Control Center, 710043, Xi’an, China

    Hong-Xin Shen

  2. Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica e Aerospaziale, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, Politecnico di Torino, 10129, Torino, Italy

    Lorenzo Casalino

  3. College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, 410073, Changsha, China

    Ya-Zhong Luo

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  1. Hong-Xin Shen
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  2. Lorenzo Casalino
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  3. Ya-Zhong Luo
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Correspondence to Lorenzo Casalino.

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Shen, HX., Casalino, L. & Luo, YZ. Global Search Capabilities of Indirect Methods for Impulsive Transfers. J of Astronaut Sci 62, 212–232 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40295-015-0073-x

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