Trajectory Simulation For Aeroassisted Orbital Transfer

With the development of Modern spacecraft mission design in the last few decades, Several novel techniques have been incorporated into mission profiles, and have proved beneficial to the overall mission. Aeroassisted orbital transfer is one such revolutionary technique. The concept of aeroassisted orbital transfer is presented, and some achievements in actual applications during the developing process; orbital dynamics equations for aeroassisted orbital transfer are derived according to the conversion among several coordinate systems and equations proposed in documents; The aerodynamic drag is computed utilizing CFD and DSMC method. Then, simulated the process of orbital transfer.This paper employed aeroassisted orbital transfer technique in order to achieve a circular low-earth orbit, starting from the geostationary orbit. A spacecraft model with two large panels suitable for aeroassist is considerable. It is observed that an initial geostationary orbit can be reduced to a circular low-earth orbit, using a total of 8 atmospheric passes, and about 43.7 hours, the height of this orbit is 350km. The sensitivity of the spacecraft motion with respect to parameters of equations is presented, and it can be proved that aeroassisted orbital transfer will lead to significant savings in spacecraft propellant mass during Earth orbital transfer according to comparing to Hohmann transfer.The method proposed in this paper will lead to significant savings in spacecraft propellant mass during the orbit transfer,i.e.that is increasing payload mass. This result has considerable importance for Mars explorations and Earth orbital transfer missions.