Optimal station keeping by electric propulsion with thrust operation constraints

The orbit of a geostationary satellite has to be corrected from time to time in order to compensate for the effects of various perturbations. This is usually done by means of a system of thrusters mounted on the satellite. In this paper a method is developed to find the optimal thrusting strategy for the case of an electric propulsion system under given limitations on thrust magnitude and operation times. Optimization techniques are applied to minimize a cost function which is a weighted combination of fuel consumption and station keeping errors.Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Mathematical Methods in Celestial Mechanics held at Oberwolfach (West Germany) from 14 to 19 August, 1978.