Department of Aerospace Engineering

Guidance, Control, and Astrodynamics Seminar Series: "Optimal Autonomous Deorbit Guidance," Morgan Baldwin, AER E Graduate Student

Morgan Baldwin

Morgan Baldwin

AER E Graduate Student (Ping Lu, Major Professor)

Thursday, October 29, 2009
4:10 PM
Room 1235 Howe Hall

Optimal Autonomous Deorbit Guidance

This work presents a preliminary study on autonomous guidance of deorbit maneuvers. The problem is for a vehicle to autonomously execute a minimum-fuel, finite-time deorbit maneuver that achieves desired entry interface conditions. Many issues, such as impulse versus finite-time burn, single versus multiple-burn deorbit, apogee and non-apogee deorbit, and higher order gravity effects, impact the solution to the problem. The guidance problem is formulated as an optimal control problem with coast-burn-coast trajectory structure. General entry interface targeting conditions are formulated to allow variable dependence among flight path angle, velocity, and range-to-go. The linear relationship between the entry interface flight path angle and velocity used by the Space Shuttle is shown to be a special case of this general formulation. For numerical solutions, an analytical multiple-shooting algorithm is used. Numerical simulation results are provided to demonstrate the method.

Brief Bio: Morgan received her undergraduate degrees from Virginia Tech in Ocean Engineering and Mathematics in May 2005. She received an MS in May 2007 in Applied Math from Iowa State University and an ME in Aerospace Engineering in August 2008.  Currently, she is working towards her PhD under the guidance of Professor Ping Lu.