General Reentry Trajectory Planning Method Based on Improved Maneuver Coefficient

In the past few decades, the reentry trajectory planning technologies have gone through great evolutions. Since the proposed methods are more or less computationally intensive, the demand to plan the reentry trajectory onboard may not be met. In this paper, a general trajectory planning method is proposed for reentry based on the improved maneuver coefficient, which is defined to describe the relationship between the longitudinal range and the real flight range, so that the drag acceleration profile is more precise and the calculation is smaller. The trajectory planning is divided into the length and the curvature sub-problems: the former is determined by the specified maneuver coefficient, and the latter is controlled by an adjustable heading error corridor to achieve required terminal states. The three-dimensional reference trajectory is finally generated based on the appointed maneuver coefficient and the drag-acceleration profile. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can quickly generate the reference trajectory and has good potential in the rapid trajectory generation.