Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Low-Thrust Control Of Orbital Elements, Nathan Harl
Low-Thrust Control Of Orbital Elements, Nathan Harl
Doctoral Dissertations
"This dissertation presents a method for controlling the orbital elements of a spacecraft using continuous low-thrust systems. The method involves the use of a general performance index, which is designed to minimize the difference between the instantaneous orbital elements of a spacecraft and some desired set of orbital elements. Due to the generality of the controller design, the resultant controller can be applied to a wide variety of scenarios about various bodies in space. To minimize the designed performance index, a shooting method and a Sequential Quadratic Programming algorithm are utilized and compared.
The primary application of the general controller …