Continuous low-thrust time-optimal orbital maneuver

Indirect optimization for the continuous low-thrust minimum time orbital maneuvers including the transfer, intercept and rendezvous are studied in this paper. The difference among the three maneuvers mainly lie in the terminal constraint conditions. By the Pontryagin maximum principle, the trajectory optimization problem is converted into the two-point boundary-value problem, and the terminal constraint conditions of the three orbital maneuver missions are also investigated respectively. The single shooting method is used to solve the corresponding boundary-value problem, and the simulations show that the product of the minimum flight time and the maximal thrust is near constant in the three maneuver problems.