Impulsive multi-rendezvous trajectory design and optimization

This paper investigates methods for optimizing an impulsive multi-rendezvous trajectory aimed at performing a complete tour of a prescribed set of targets. A simple heuristic is adopted for estimating the cost of each transfer leg. A genetic algorithm is used for optimizing both target sequence and rendezvous epochs. This approach is tested firstly by assuming that all transfers have the same duration. Then, the time domain is discretized over a finer grid, allowing a more appropriate sizing of the time-window allocated for each leg. Numerical results for a set comprising up to 15 targets are presented.