Abstract
Close-range formation flying of multiple satellites is an important technology for future space missions, where formation reconfiguration is a very important field and needs to design suitable flight paths and consider the risk of collisions between satellites. This paper uses the Bezier shape-based (SB) method to rapidly generate the low-thrust collision-avoidance flight paths in the formation reconfiguration. The reconfiguration process of two satellite formations is considered and compared with the finite Fourier series (FFS) method. The simulation results show that the Bezier method spends less computation time to obtain better performance index than the FFS method. In order to verify the applicability of the results obtained by the Bezier method to a direct solver, the results are applied to the Gauss pseudospectral method (GPM) solver as an initial guess. The results show that the Bezier method can take a short time to design suitable initial collision-avoidance flight paths for an direct optimization solver. This is very important for the rapid feasibility evaluation of numerous flight scenarios at the stage of initial mission design and onboard flight paths generation.
Highlights
In recent years, the scientific community has shown great interest in interplanetary missions [1]–[3]
RESULT ANALYSIS In the simulation of the formation reconstruction of planar triangles, the initial flight paths are designed by using Bezier and finite Fourier series (FFS) methods, and the solution obtained by Bezier method is used as an initial guess for the Gauss pseudospectral method (GPM) solver
In order to verify the progressiveness of the proposed method, the comparisons with the FFS method are implemented through numerical simulation
Summary
The scientific community has shown great interest in interplanetary missions [1]–[3]. In view of the collision problem in the formation reconstruction, this paper uses SB method to rapidly generate three-dimensional low-thrust collision-avoidance flight paths. This paper used the Bezier method to rapidly design the three-dimensional flight paths of close-range satellite formation and considered the Clohessy-Wiltshire (C-W) equation at the same time. The simulation results show that the proposed method can rapidly generate appropriate initial flight paths in a short time, which is very important for satellite formation reconfiguration and enables satellites to calculate the flight paths of reconstructed formation everywhen.
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