Chai, RunqiSavvaris, AlTsourdos, AntoniosChai, SenchunXia, Yuanqing2018-02-132018-02-132018-02-03Chai R, Savvaris A, Tsourdos A, Chai S, Xia Y, Optimal fuel consumption finite-thrust orbital hopping of aeroassisted spacecraft, Aerospace Science and Technology, Volume 75, April 2018, pp. 172-1821270-9638http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ast.2017.12.026https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/12993In the paper, the problem of minimum-fuel aeroassisted spacecraft regional reconnaissance (orbital hopping) is considered. A new nonlinear constrained optimal control formulation is designed and constructed so as to describe this mission scenario. This formulation contains multiple exo-atmospheric and atmospheric flight phases and correspondingly, two sets of flight dynamics. The constructed continuous-time optimal control system is then discretized via a multi-phase global collocation technique. The resulting discrete-time system is optimized using a newly proposed gradient-based optimization algorithm. Several comparative simulations are carried out and the obtained optimal results indicate that it is effective and feasible to use the proposed multi-phase optimal control design for achieving the aeroassisted vehicle orbital hopping mission.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Aeroassisted spacecraftOrbital hoppingOptimal controlTrajectory optimizationArticle