Design approach of contingency point return trajectory for manned lunar missions based on homotopy continuation

Abstract In terms of the requirement of contingency return during the circumlunar flight phase in manned lunar missions, this article presents a contingency point return trajectory design approach. In consideration of the point return constraint, an initial value estimate model is proposed. A nonlinear programming problem is constructed and solved by adopting an improved differential evolution algorithm with good global search ability. On the basis of the initial value estimate, homotopy continuation is used to gradually approximate and obtain the high-fidelity solution. The simulation results indicate that the design approach can effectively calculate a contingency point return trajectory with good convergence.