Abstract
Solar sails have many advantages over traditional chemical propulsion spacecraft, such as needlessness of fuel, high payload ratio, long service life, and great application potential in deep space exploration, interstellar voyage, and other aerospace application fields. However, the period of solar sail transfer from the initial orbit to the desired orbit is relatively long. Thus, it is necessary to optimize the transfer trajectory of solar sail according to specific tasks. The hp-adaptive pseudospectral method combines the global pseudospectral method with the finite element method, which adopts double layer optimization strategy to solve the optimal control problem and has higher computational efficiency and accuracy than the traditional global pseudospectral method. In this paper, the pressure of solar light acting on the solar sail is analyzed, and the kinematic equation of the solar sail is established in polar coordinate system first; then the basic principle of the hp-adaptive pseudospectral method is introduced, and the steps of solving the transfer trajectory optimization problem by hp-adaptive pseudospectral method are proposed; finally, the trajectory optimization of the solar sail from Earth orbit to Sun-centered Mars orbit is simulated as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of hp-adaptive pseudospectral method in the orbit transfer optimization problem of solar sail. The simulation results show that the adopted method is not sensitive to the initial values and has more reasonable distribution and less computational cost than the Gauss pseudospectral method.
Highlights
With the increasing complexity and space distance of deep space exploration missions, the conventional propulsion methods hardly meet the demands
Solar sail is a new type of spacecraft that produces propulsion by a large area of light film that reflects solar photons, where the power source is natural solar energy, without consuming the chemical fuel
The impact force of solar photons is very weak, but they continuously act on the solar sail, which will generate continuous small propulsion and persistent acceleration
Summary
With the increasing complexity and space distance of deep space exploration missions, the conventional propulsion methods hardly meet the demands. Rao et al has the characteristics of flexibility of collocation points distribution, sparsity of calculation, and fast convergence and can adjust adaptively the number of the units or the degree of the polynomial in the corresponding segments according to the requirement of calculation accuracy This method combines the advantages of the global pseudospectral method and the finite element method and can greatly reduce the computational cost. The hp-adaptive pseudospectral method is adopted to solve the trajectory optimization problem for a solar sail during the transfer from Earth orbit to Mars orbit; the collocation points distribution and time-consuming of hpadaptive pseudospectral method and Gauss pseudospectral method are compared and analyzed in this paper.
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