Space the Finite Frontier

Reachable and controllable sets for electric propulsion spacecraft are important to many problems including: dynamic replanning, robust mission design, space situational awareness, assessing advanced concepts, and threat assessments. Current methods result in a two-point boundary value problem or are limited in their application. We solve the reachable and controllable problem by formulating it as a multi-stage indirect approach. We demonstrate that this enables rapid, reliable, and autonomous estimates of the reachable and controllable set. We show that our approach works in strong multi-body environments (i.e., flybys).