Two-Impulse Cotangent Rendezvous Between Coplanar Elliptic and Hyperbolic Orbits

The two-impulse cotangent orbit rendezvous problem between coplanar elliptic and hyperbolic orbits was studied. This problem requires two tangent impulses for the chaser and the same flight time for two spacecraft. With the coasting time and the transfer time for the hyperbolic orbit, the flight-time equation and its derivative are obtained. Different from the cotangent rendezvous between two coplanar elliptic orbits, there are finite solutions even though there are no bounds on the revolution numbers for initial and transfer orbits. The two-impulse cotangent rendezvous between coplanar elliptic and hyperbolic orbits provides a new approach with simple controls for the cycler architecture, which requires rendezvous with the transfer vehicle that is on a hyperbolic trajectory during the planetary flyby.