Orbital transfer: Some links between the low-thrust and the impulse cases

Abstract

Here, we investigate an orbital transfer from a low Earth orbit to the geostationary one where the considered criterion to maximize is the final mass. We seek to observe numerically the connections between the impulse transfer and the low-thrust one after giving two computational methods in each cases. We see that the links are very strong and that the impulse transfer can be viewed as the limit of the low-thrust transfer when its number of revolutions increases.