Minimum time control of the Kepler equation

Minimum fuel control of the planar circular restricted three-body problem

The circular restricted three-body problem is considered to model the dynamics of an artificial body submitted to the attraction of two planets. Minimization of the fuel consumption of the spacecraft during the transfer, e.g. from the Earth to the Moon, is considered. In the light of the controllability results of Caillau and Daoud (SIAM J Control Optim, 2012), existence for this optimal control problem is discussed under simplifying assumptions. Thanks to Pontryagin maximum principle, the properties of fuel minimizing controls is detailed, revealing a bang-bang structure which is typical of L1-minimization problems. Because of the resulting non-smoothness of the Hamiltonian two-point bound…

3D Geosynchronous Transfer of a Satellite: Continuation on the Thrust

The minimum-time transfer of a satellite from a low and eccentric initial orbit toward a high geostationary orbit is considered. This study is preliminary to the analysis of similar transfer cases with more complicated performance indexes (maximization of payload, for instance). The orbital inclination of the spacecraft is taken into account (3D model), and the thrust available is assumed to be very small (e.g. 0.3 Newton for an initial mass of 1500 kg). For this reason, many revolutions are required to achieve the transfer and the problem becomes very oscillatory. In order to solve it numerically, an optimal control model is investigated and a homotopic procedure is introduced, namely cont…

Discrete and differential homotopy in circular restricted three-body control

The planar circular restricted three-body problem is considered. The control enters linearly in the equation of motion to model the thrust of the third body. The minimum time optimal control problem has two scalar parameters: The ratio of the primaries masses which embeds the two-body problem into the three-body one, and the upper bound on the control norm. Regular extremals of the maximum principle are computed by shooting thanks to continuations with respect to both parameters. Discrete and dierential homotopy are compared in connection with second order sucient conditions in optimal control. Homotopy with respect to control bound gives evidence of various topological structures of extr…

Numerical control and orbital transfers

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On some Riemannian aspects of two and three-body controlled problems

The flow of the Kepler problem (motion of two mutually attracting bodies) is known to be geodesic after the work of Moser [20], extended by Belbruno and Osipov [2, 21]: Trajectories are reparameterizations of minimum length curves for some Riemannian metric. This is not true anymore in the case of the three-body problem, and there are topological obstructions as observed by McCord et al. [19]. The controlled formulations of these two problems are considered so as to model the motion of a spacecraft within the influence of one or two planets. The averaged flow of the (energy minimum) controlled Kepler problem with two controls is shown to remain geodesic. The same holds true in the case of o…