Abstract
The minimum-fuel space travel problem for the planar Earth-Mars transfer by a low-thrust ion rocket is considered. The investigation shows that the use of the classical switching function and the natural boundary condition of the Hamiltonian leads to numerical difficulties, caused by the nondifferentiability of the Hamiltonian. It is shown, however, that these difficulties can be overcome by substitution of the switching function and the Hamiltonian condition. The numerical solution by multiple shooting techniques is presented.
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Communicated by H. Halkin
The author wishes to thank Prof. R. Bulirsch, who stimulated and encouraged this work. He is indebted to Mr. H. J. Diekhoff for many helpful comments and to Miss K. Horn for her careful reading of the manuscript.
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Oberle, H.J. On the numerical computation of minimum-fuel, Earth-Mars transfer. J Optim Theory Appl 22, 447–453 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00932866
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00932866