Fuel-Optimal Spacecraft Rendezvous with Hybrid On–Off Continuous and Impulsive Thrust

The article of record may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.2514/1.27716A Hybrid method is introduced for a minimum-propellant rendezvous and docking maneuver of a spacecraft having both multilevel continuous and impulsive thrusters. We assume that the chaser spacecraft uses a set of independently operated time-continuous low-thrust actuators for the rendezvous maneuvering far from the target and then switches to impulsive thrusters for thedocking maneuver