Optimal impulsive ellipse-to-circle coplanar rendezvous

The problem of ellipse-to-circle coplanar rendezvous with chaser spacecraft in low eccentricity was investigated in this paper. With reference frame established in the centroid of the target spacecraft, the process of ellipse-to-circle coplanar rendezvous was described by the relative equations based on cylindrical reference frame, and then the solutions and distributions of optimal rendezvous models of a kind of close ellipse-to-circle coplanar rendezvous were provided. The simulation results showed that the guidance law based on the optimal rendezvous model in this research has good performance, and that the distributions of optimal rendezvous models of ellipse-to-circle coplanar rendezvous with the chaser spacecraft in low eccentricity are similar, albeit with slight difference, to those of rendezvous between close circular orbits. The work in this paper is a useful extension to Prussing’s optimal rendezvous theory between close circular orbits. Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 90305024)