Constant-Thrust Orbital Transfer about Binary Asteroids Using Bilinear Tangent Guidance

For the study case of 66391 Moshup, a 600 kg, BCG-guided spacecraft with a 24 mN thruster performed an aggressive non-coplanar transfer between L1 and L2 Halo orbits at the cost of only 3.38 g of fuel. Then the BCG-guided trajectories' robustness is validated thoroughly by N = 600 Monte Carlo simulations, respectively. Finally, BCG's excellent tradeoff between computational efficiency and near-optimality is well demonstrated by comparison with well-established optimization methods. For example, in a coplanar transfer with a 1.5 mN thruster, BCG can converge over 200 times faster than interior point optimization with only a 9% cost surplus in fuel compared to the optimum. It is indicated that BCG algorithm is a promising option for autonomous orbital control in binary asteroid missions considering its computational and fuel efficiency.