Two-Phase Impulse Maneuvers Strategy for Long-Range Guidance Spacecraft Rendezvous

This paper proposes a two-phase impulse maneuver strategy for long-range guidance, optimizing fuel and time consumption during rendezvous and docking while enabling a rapid approach to the target spacecraft. First, a mathematical model is developed based on the orbital dynamics of the pursuer and the target spacecraft in an Earth-centered inertial coordinate system (ECI). And then, the model integrates the pursuer spacecraft’s fuel, time, and other constraints into an observable Markov Decision Process (MDP). When the target spacecraft carries out impulse maneuvers to move away, the pursuer adopts a two-phase strategy to keep moving closer to the target. The entire pursuit-evasion process is trained through reinforcement learning, simulating the optimal orbital impulse maneuver path. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the two-phase strategy confirms the robustness and applicability of the framework for spacecraft rendezvous and docking scenarios.