TWO-IMPULSE RENDEZVOUS NEAR CIRCULAR ORBIT DETERMINED THROUGH A NEW PRIMER VECTOR ANALYSIS

This is the second of three papers on optimal impulsive rendezvous of a spacecraft in an inertial frame near a circular orbit. This study is restricted to non-degenerate two-impulse and one-impulse solutions. Optimal non-degenerate nonsingular two-impulse rendezvous is found to consist of four categories of solutions depending on the four ways the primer vector locus intersects the unit circle. Necessary and sufficient conditions for each category of solutions are presented. The region of the boundary values that admit each category of solutions are found, and in each case a closed-form solution of the optimal velocity increments is presented. Some examples are simulated. Similar results are presented for the simpler optimal rendezvous that require only one-impulse.