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An aircraft transition connects two flight conditions and is a fundamental component of aerospace operations. For achieving a seamless transition that accurately connects two steady flights, a hierarchical parameterization method is developed in this article for generating smooth flight trajectories satisfying hard boundary constraints on controls and control derivatives of all orders. The proposed work is based on a trigonometric series parameterization of control variables and hierarchically parameterizes the series coefficients with flat and logistic functions, leading to a new set of coefficients and a formulation that inherently guarantees the desired conditions. The new set of coefficients can be determined by optimization methods and can be integrated in existing methods with the advantage of streamlining the problem formulation. Simulation studies including comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electric solar wind sail (E-sail) is an innovative propulsion system, which can generate low and continuous thrust without any propellant by reflecting ions from the solar wind. Because the propulsive acceleration of E-sail is low and continuous, its trajectory is usually characterized by long flight time. In order to explore more flight plans, rapid trajectory design is useful for preliminary mission analysis and design. This paper presents a method for rapid generation of minimum-time, three-dimensional trajectories for an E-sail using the finite Fourier series shape-based method. Unlike the more conventional electric thruster, the thrust vector of an E-sail is constrained. In order to consider the characteristics of the E-sail thrust, inequality constraints of thrust acceleration are investigated based on a recent thrust model. The numerical simulation results show that the proposed method is useful to quickly design the flight trajectory of the E-sail by considering the actual characteristics of the thrust vector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]