Publication Date:
2019-06-28
Description:
A near-optimal guidance law for the descent trajectory for earth orbit re-entry of a fully reusable single-stage-to-orbit pure rocket launch vehicle is derived. A methodology is developed to investigate using both bank angle and altitude as control variables and selecting parameters that maximize various performance functions. The method is based on the energy-state model of the aircraft equations of motion. The major task of this paper is to obtain optimal re-entry trajectories under a variety of performance goals: minimum time, minimum surface temperature, minimum heating, and maximum heading change; four classes of trajectories were investigated: no banking, optimal left turn banking, optimal right turn banking, and optimal bank chattering. The cost function is in general a weighted sum of all performance goals. In particular, the trade-off between minimizing heat load into the vehicle and maximizing cross range distance is investigated. The results show that the optimization methodology can be used to derive a wide variety of near-optimal trajectories.
Keywords:
Launch Vehicles and Space Vehicles
Type:
NASA/CR-97-112611
,
NAS 1.26:112611
,
AIAA Paper 97-3582
,
American Inst. of Aeronautics and Astronautics Journal; 306-316
Format:
application/pdf
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