Aerogravity-assist capture into the three-body system: A preliminary design

Aero-gravity assist (AGA) is a low-cost maneuver for an interplanetary vehicle since it can potentially replace thrust with aerodynamic force to save fuel consumption. In this study, an AGA-maneuver capture scheme to deliver a vehicle into a three-body system is presented, and a successive approximation-based method is proposed to optimize atmospheric trajectories. Based on the analysis of the aerodynamic deceleration process, the AGA capture maneuver is first formulated as a coplanar atmospheric flight process with fixed time and strict endpoint-state constraints. Then, the lossless convexification and successive approximation techniques are applied to construct the solving process of iteratively optimizing the AGA trajectories. Finally, the relaxation strategy to the strict terminal state constraints and the heavily penalized-function method are developed to avoid the artificial infeasibility of the problem and improve the convergence. Numerical simulations, demonstrated by the AGA-capture into Sun-Mars L2 Halo orbits and Sun-Mars backward stable orbits, show the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method. It is the first time that the AGA-maneuver is combined with the dynamic property of the three-body system, and the proposed method can potentially enrich the possibility of the low-energy interplanetary transfer.