Guidance law design for the final stage of the orbit injection problem

In this paper, optimal guidance law design considering fixed final state and time for the final phase a spacecraft or launch vehicle is investigated and studied. This guidance law, not only satisfied a specific optimality criterion, but it also has the least sensitivity to the initial state’s deviations; which is due to the inclusion of the nonlinear terms in the mathematical modeling using the high order expansions method. The main goal of this research, is to investigate the development and to augment the capability of the high order expansions method for guidance law design. Different implementations of this approach including the differential algebra high order, the generating function based high order and vectorized high order expansions methods have been investigated. After reviewing the implementation concepts of the high order expansions method, the effectiveness of this method has been studied. Then a 3-dimensional injection of a satellite problem has been chosen as the case study and after extracting the mathematical model and nominal optimal solution, the sensitivity variables have been extracted up to the 3rd order. Afterwards, to investigate the performance of the designed guidance law, the Monte Carlo simulations have been performed and it has been shown that the designed guidance law on the basis of the Taylor series and high order expansions method has a good accuracy and is a valuable alterative to the nominal trajectory tracking guidance approach.