A Preliminary Investigation of the Use of Inertial Guidance for CO-Planar Orbital Rendezvous

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A Preliminary Investigation of the Use of Inertial Guidance for CO-Planar Orbital Rendezvous

D. B. Darby

This thesis is a preliminary investigation of the use of inertial guidance to control the transfer orbit injection phase of an orbital rendezvous. The guidance system to be investigated is discussed along with the rendezvous situation. Assumptions are made to narrow the problem to a rendezvous between elliptical co-planar orbits about a spherical body, with the vehicle being transferred reacting as a point mass. The theory of the guidance equations is given and the method used to solve them is explained fully. An analysis of the functions of the guidance system is made in order to write a digital computer program which will simulate the system. The resulting program simulates the operation of the guidance system and the flight of the space vehicle during both the guidance phase and the coasting phase. It accounts for the fact that due to guidance system and initial condition errors the motion of the vehicle is not exactly as the guidance system computes it to be. With the program three representative cases of rendezvous are investigated. The first case is a rendezvous between widely separated circular orbits; the second is a rendezvous between nonaligned highly eccentric orbits; and the last case is a very realistic rendezvous between slightly eccentric non-aligned low Earth orbits. (Author)