Overview of Earth-Moon Transfer Trajectory Modeling and Design

TheMoon is the only celestial body that human beings have visited.The design of the Earth-Moon transfer orbits is a critical issue in lunar exploration missions.In the 21st century,new lunar missions including the construction of the lunar space station,the permanent lunar base,and the Earth-Moon transportation network have been proposed,requiring low-cost,expansive launch windows and a fixed arrival epoch for any launch date within the launch window.The low-energy and low-thrust transfers are promising strategies to satisfy the demands.This review provides a detailed landscape of Earth-Moon transfer trajectory design processes,from the traditional patched conic to the state-of-the-art low-energy and low-thrust methods.Essential mechanisms of the various utilized dynamic models and the characteristics of the different design methods are discussed in hopes of helping readers grasp thebasic overviewof the current Earth-Moon transfer orbitdesignmethods anda deep academic background is unnecessary for the context understanding.

Harmonic Balance Methods:A Review and Recent Developments

The harmonic balance(HB)method is one of the most commonly used methods for solving periodic solutions of both weakly and strongly nonlinear dynamical systems.However,it is confined to low-order approximations due to complex symbolic operations.Many variants have been developed to improve the HB method,among which the time domain HB-like methods are regarded as crucial improvements because of their fast computation and simple derivation.So far,there are two problems remaining to be addressed.i)A dozen of different versions of HB-like methods,in frequency domain or time domain or in hybrid,have been developed;unfortunately,misclassification pervades among them due to the unclear borderlines of different methods.ii)The time domain HB-like methods suffer from non-physical solutions,which have been shown to be caused by aliasing(mixture of the high-order into the low-order harmonics).Although a series of dealiasing techniques have been developed over the past two decades,the mechanism of aliasing and the final solution to dealiasing are still not well known to the academic community.This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the development of HB-like methods and enunciate their principal differences.In particular,the time domain methods are emphasized with the famous aliasing phenomenon clearly addressed.

Preface:Nonlinear Computational and Control Methods in Aerospace Engineering

In practice,almost all real engineering systems are essentially nonlinear.Linear systems are just idealized models that approximate the nonlinear systems in a prescribed situation subject to a certain accuracy.Once nonlinearity is included,analytical solutions are rarely available for almost all real problems.Therefore,nonlinear computational methods are becoming important.In most aerospace problems,however,a relatively high-fidelity nonlinear model has to be established,especially when the system is immersing in a complicated environment and nonlinearity is not negligible anymore.Many complex phenomena,i.e.,bifurcation,limit cycle oscillation,chaos,turbulence,may occur in a variety of aerospace systems,which may be described by nonlinear Ordinary Differential Equations(ODEs)for rigid body problems or Partial Differential Equations(PDEs)for flexible solids or fluid mechanics problems.In general,nonlinearity in aerospace systems is often regarded as unwanted and troublemaker,due to the fact that considering nonlinearity makes the solution methods as well as the control methods more difficult.Therefore,there has been a general tendency to circumvent,design around them,control them,or simply ignore them.

Postcapture stabilization of space robots considering actuator failures with bounded torques

Space robotics is regarded as one of the most impressing approaches for space debris removal missions. Due to the residual momentum of debris, it is essential to stabilize the base rapidly after capture. This paper presents a novel control strategy for stabilization of a space robot in postcapture considering actuator failures and bounded torques. In the control strategy, the motion of the manipulator is not regarded as a disturbance to the base; in contrast, it is utilized to compensate for the limitation of the control torques by means of an inverse dynamical model of the system. Different scenarios where actuators are external mechanisms or momentum exchange devices have been carried out, and for actuator failures, both single-and two-actuator failures have been considered. Regarding to the performance of actuators, control torques are bounded. In cases that either single or two actuators have failed, the base can be stabilized kinematically when actuators are external mechanisms, but can only be stabilized dynamically when only momentum exchange devices are used. Finally, a space robot with a seven-degree-of-freedom manipulator in postcapture is studied to verify the validity and feasibility of the proposed control scheme. Simulation results show that the whole system can be stabilized rapidly.

Fast and accurate adaptive collocation iteration method for orbit dynamic problems

For over half a century,numerical integration methods based on finite difference,such as the Runge-Kutta method and the Euler method,have been popular and widely used for solving orbit dynamic problems.In general,a small integration step size is always required to suppress the increase of the accumulated computation error,which leads to a relatively slow computation speed.Recently,a collocation iteration method,approximating the solutions of orbit dynamic problems iteratively,has been developed.This method achieves high computation accuracy with extremely large step size.Although efficient,the collocation iteration method suffers from two limitations:(A)the computational error limit of the approximate solution is not clear;(B)extensive trials and errors are always required in tuning parameters.To overcome these problems,the influence mechanism of how the dynamic problems and parameters affect the error limit of the collocation iteration method is explored.On this basis,a parameter adjustment method known as the“polishing method”is proposed to improve the computation speed.The method proposed is demonstrated in three typical orbit dynamic problems in aerospace engineering:a low Earth orbit propagation problem,a Molniya orbit propagation problem,and a geostationary orbit propagation problem.Numerical simulations show that the proposed polishing method is faster and more accurate than the finite-difference-based method and the most advanced collocation iteration method.