Fuel optimal maneuvers for multispacecraft interferometric imaging systems
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In this paper, the design of minimum-fuel maneuvers for multispacecraft interferometric imaging systems is studied. It is argued that the underlying optimization problem is computationally intractable, through its similarity to the traveling salesman problem, and through an optimal control argument, and thus it is necessary to resort to heuristics in order to solve the problem. The design of minimum-fuel spiral maneuvers is considered in defining the constraints on the coverage of the u-v plane. It is shown that the geometric design problem, the optimization problem obtained by fixing the angular rate of the spiral, and the kinematic design problem, obtained by fixing the spiraling rate of the spiral, are both convex in deep space, that is, perturbation free motion, and in near-Earth orbits. As an application of the methodology developed, fuel optimal maneuvers are found for a deep space imaging application and the fuel consumption and power requirements of the system are calculated to gain knowledge about the feasibility of such maneuvers.
