A Study about Optimal Orbit Control of Dive and Ascent Satellite

Dive and ascent satellite (DAS) is a kind of satellite that can approach very close to the Earth, which was designed by National Aerospace Laboratory (NAL) of Japan in later 1970´s. Now we noted the function of the satellite that can descend and ascend, and proposed to use it for getting detailed information of the area stricken by a natural disaster. In this paper optimal orbit control of DAS is discussed, where the Earth is treated as an ellipsoid of revolution, and the atmosphere drag and the second zonal coefficient is considered. The optimal orbit control problems are treated as nonlinear two point boundary value problems, and solved by the steepest ascent method (STP)