ATMOSPHERIC AND NEAR PLANET TRAJECTORY OPTIMIZATION BY THE VARIATIONAL STEEPEST-DESCENT METHOD

摘要

The variational steepest-descent method is described in detail. The analysis is first developed for a system consis¬ting of a single-stage. Performance, constraint, and trajec¬tory termination criteria may be any functions of terminal state and time.nThe analysis is then extended to multi-stage systems. Here, a stage is bounded by two points selected from initial conditions, points of state derivative discontinuity, and terminal conditions. In the multi-stage analysis the stage-times replace the independent variable time as the independent variable time itself thus becomes an additional state variable.