DEVELOPING A TOOL FOR THE TRAJECTORY PLANNING OF CUBESAT MISSIONS

摘要

Developing a modern low thrust trajectory planning tool for applications topicosatellites poses a number of unique challenges. This work discusses the developmentof a propellant-minimum trajectory planning tool, that combines ahigher order integrator, algebraic differentiation techniques, adaptive step sizecontrol, a non-linear programming problem solver, and analysis of cumulativedensity functions of the control profile to generate a robust, extendable solutionframework. Discussions of the lessons learned in merging these techniques, aswell as a few demonstrated case studies will be included. The work will beshown to be extendable in the future towards cooperative formation flying.