Optimal finite thrust rendezvous using beneficial effects of the Earth oblateness

The main purpose of this paper is to compute optimal or near optimal low-thrust low-Earth circular minimum-fuel orbital transfers with constrained final rendezvous and bounded transfer duration. The proposed transfer strategy consists in taking advantage of the Earth oblateness to provide some natural corrections, i.e., correction with no cost consumption, The satellite transfer is performed by a three-bum thrusting scenario, defining two intermediary drift orbits. A direct optimization method is used to optimize the trajectory, initialized by the multiple impulsive thrust solution. A Sequential Quadratic Programming algorithm is then used to solve the resulting NLP problem. Sub-optimality is tested by checking the necessary conditions of the maximum principle.