Abstract
The problem considered is minimum time transfer of a low thrust rocket between elliptic orbits in an inverse square field. The rocket is assumed to have a constant thrust magnitude which is much smaller than the force of gravity. The method of averaging is used to determine optimum transfers in three spatial dimensions. Five integrals are obtained for the tenth order system of canonical equations of optimal motion. These integrals are theoretically sufficient to solve the problem completely. As an example, an analytic solution is given for the problem of transfer between inclined circular orbits.
This Research was supported by NASA under contract NASW-1684.
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Edelbaum, T.N. (1970). Optimum thrust-limited orbit transfer in strong gravity fields. In: Balakrishnan, A.V., Contensou, M., de Veubeke, B.F., Krée, P., Lions, J.L., Moiseev, N.N. (eds) Symposium on Optimization. Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol 132. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0066675
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0066675
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