Minimum-fuel orbit transfer between SSO using low-thrust considering J₂ perturbation

The objective of this paper is to find the minimum-fuel orbit transfer between sun-synchronous orbits with low-thrust while considering the J₂ perturbation. A quasi-circular orbit model with the effect of the J₂ perturbation is established. The minimum fuel problem is solved by the indirect optimization method. Several effective techniques are employed in solving the indirect optimization problem with a shooting method, which include energy-to-fuel homotopy, normalization of the initial costate vector, computation of the analytic Jacobians matrix, and switching detection. The simulation results show that the solution of the minimum-fuel long duration orbit transfer with low-thrust considering J₂ perturbation can be obtained by applying these preceding techniques.