V-Infinity Leveraging Boundary-Value Problem and Application in Spacecraft Trajectory Design

Abstract

Interplanetary and intermoon tour missions have benefited from the implementation of leveraging maneuvers that efficiently change spacecraft energy relative to a flyby body. In the current work, these leveraging maneuvers are generalized and reformulated into a boundary-value problem suitable for broad trajectory searches using only one additional continuous degree of freedom. The presented method naturally incorporates noncircular orbits and arbitrary ephemeris locations for bodies as well as leveraging maneuvers between different bodies. These advantages come from using the same boundary conditions as the Lambert problem, which also maintains the Lambert-based outer-loop search architecture used in many trajectory design tools. The general maneuver formulation of the presented method allows it to be used for interplanetary or intermoon trajectories and allows the incorporation of nontangent leveraging transfers. Some examples of the new formulation’s utility are also explored using representative transfers; these examples present some of the families of leveraging solutions and show that bielliptic transfers are a special case of interbody leveraging.