The optimal guidance law for rendezvous and docking of spacecraft

Rendezvous & docking (RVD) include four phases: ground longrang phase, homing phase, approach phase, docking phase. For the optimal rendezvous, most solutions are based on the C-W function. This paper studies the optimal rendezvous solutions which based on the traditional C-W equations, and studies optimal rendezvous solutions which based on the method of nonlinear programming. A recently developed direct optimization technique is employed, which converts the optimal control problem into a nonlinear programming one.