Optimal impulsive rendezvous with terminal tangent burn between elliptic and hyperbolic orbits considering the trajectory constraints

In cycler architectures, a crew "taxi" docks with the interplanetary transfer vehicle on a hyperbolic flyby trajectory. For safety considerations, a tangent orbit technique is adopted in impulsive rendezvous. Reachable domain for transfer orbit with a terminal tangent burn is first analyzed. Then two-impulse transfers with terminal tangent burn between elliptic and hyperbolic orbits are optimized in term of semimajor axes, eccentricity, inclination, and the relative position of the lines of apsides and their effects on the optimal transfer orbits are summarized. Finally, based on the results of two-impulse orbital transfer, feasible transfer trajectories are constructed to serve as initial guesses for determining constrained optimal impulsive rendezvous trajectories from a parking orbit to a target hyperbolic orbit. Numerical simulation results can be applied to the preliminary design on hyperbolic rendezvous.