A Study on Reachable Domain for Aeroassisted Orbit Transfer Vehicle

The purpose of this paper is to obtain the reachable domain (RD) for space vehicle using aerodynamic force to transfer between two orbits, which is generally called Aeroassisted Orbit Transfer Vehicle (AOTV). The problem of RD for AOTV is addressed in an analytical approach by numerical optimization under a certain constraint condition. For solving this problem, firstly we describe RD for AOTV as an angle interval located on the target orbit. Secondly we transform the problem of RD to a numerical optimization problem about the upper and lower bound of this interval and give the optimization indexes and constraints. Then we can obtain the RD by using a numerical optimization method. Finally some simulations are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of this numerical optimization method.