Abstract
SOLAR sailing has long been considered for a diverse range of future mission applications. As with other forms of low-thrust propulsion, trajectory optimization has been a focus of development activities. In particular, minimum-time solar-sail trajectories have been obtained by several authors for a range of mission applications. Almost all of these studies have used the Pontryagin principle of the
calculus of variations to obtain minimum-time trajectories by the classical, indirect method (see, for example, Ref. 2). The indirect approach provides a continuous time history for the required solar sail steering angles. Only a few studies have used the competing direct approach, which recasts the task as a parameter optimization problem by discretizing the control variables. These studies have
used many discrete segments for the sail steering angles to ensure a close approximation to the continuous steering angles provided by the indirect approach and hence a close approximation to the true minimum-time trajectory
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 632-634 |
Number of pages | 2 |
Journal | Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics |
Volume | 24 |
Issue number | 5 |
Publication status | Published - 2001 |
Keywords
- solar sails
- control systems
- guidance systems
- trajectories