Abstract: A target spacecraft’s orbit must be designed for an orbit rendezvous mission. A new optimization approach is proposed for the mission by bringing both orbit keeping and phasing into effect simultaneously. Orbit keeping is to control the station and the shape of the target orbit, while orbit phasing is to make the initial phase angle desired for rendezvous. In this paper, considering such constraint conditions as the right ascension of ascending node and the inclination coresponding to the chaser spacecraft according to the rendezvous window, the resulting problem for the target orbit design is transformed into a nonlinear program-ming problem,then a sequential quadratic programming method is employed to obtain the solution. The calculation and simulation results show that application of this method not only can meet mission’s requirements with fewer maneuvers, but also can save propellant, so this work is useful for the mission planning of rendezvous and docking.

Key words: rendezvous and docking, orbital keeping, phasing, optimization