Optimal spacecraft rendezvous with PNG

Recently, along with International Space Station, many rendezvous are carried out around the earth. Some of them are unmanned space freights and require automatic rendezvous procedure. In this paper, spacecraft rendezvous with input time-lag system are formulated as nonlinear programming problems based on the proportional navigation guidance (PNG) and numerically analyzed. The optimal solutions were obtained for several objectives. The problem of choice of the navigation constant that provides minimizing rendezvous time and control effort is analyzed. The results of computer simulation are given.