Paper Published in IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems

Example of a solution to time-free, fuel optimal transfer between L2 halo and L1 halo Orbits in the CRTBP. The left two plots show the trajectory, with coasting arcs in blue, thrusting arcs in red, terminal orbits in black, and the stable manifold of the initial L2 halo orbit in grey. The right plot shows the control over time, in terms of throttle factor (u) and switching function (S).

Our recent work, titled "Continuation with Stationary Condition-Based Termination for Optimal Orbit Transfer Problems" has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems (TAES).

In this work, we propose a novel continuation approach designed to ease the solution of low-thrust spacecraft transfer trajectory optimization problems. Specifically, we begin with an easier system where some parameters (e.g., time-of-flight, location along terminal orbits) are fixed. Then, in several continuation stages, we sequentially free the set of parameters and enlarge the problem until arriving at a solution to the desired problem in which the previously fixed parameters are now free. We demonstrate our approach on two orbital transfer scenarios: a station-keeping scenario in which we reduce fuel consumption for a single station-keeping transfer by freeing the time-of-flight in a single stage, and a fuel-optimal transfer between and L2 and L1 halo orbit in the CRTBP. In the second scenario, we free three parameters in three stages; one parameterizing the spacecraft's departure point along its initial L2 halo orbit, another parameterizing its insertion point into the L1 halo orbit, and the time-of-flight, significantly reducing the fuel consumption compared to the initial solution in which all parameters are fixed. The above image displays the resulting three-burn trajectory after all three stages have been applied.

The full paper is available at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11578083

DOI: 10.1109/TAES.2026.3706327