Analytical and Numerical Study of Orbital Transfer Types Aiming Rendezvous Maneuvers

The accomplishment of orbital rendezvous maneuvers involves a very complex and risky process, especially when those maneuvers are to be executed autonomously through an un-manned space vehicle. Usually, the rendezvous process requires a chaser spacecraft to be placed on an initial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and then transferred to an upper target orbit, so as to rendezvous the target vehicle. That orbital transfer shall end with the chaser relative velocity with respect to the target equal to zero, stopping at a so-called station-keeping point shifted some kilometers away ahead of the target. In this paper, two types of orbital transfer maneuvers were simulated and analyzed aiming analysis and comparison of flight time and fuel consumption. The transfer orbital maneuvers have been assumed to be executed from a 200 km to 300 km circular orbits. Consistently with those orbits, the Hohmann and Fast Transfer have been implemented in the computer simulations. In both cases, issues like time of flight and fuel consumption were compared. To check the consistency of the rendezvous analytical computations, the resulting delta-Vs were fed into an integrated computer-simulated scenario developed with the Satellite Tool Kit (STK) software platform. Those values acted like control parameters of a modeled chaser satellite in the STK/Astrogator specialized analysis module. A satellite target vehicle was modeled into STK as well. The analysis and simulation results confirmed that in comparison with the Hohmann Transfer, the Fast Transfer obviously occurred quite faster, however it consumed at least 50% more fuel to reach the same point in the target orbit