One of the key elements for safely and successfully performing on-orbit inspection is path planning and burn scheduling.  While in low Earth or lunar orbit, relative orbital mechanics can cause unintuitive relative motion.  Depending on the state of the inspector relative to the “inspectee”, different resulting drift shapes can be observed between burns.  If not properly accounted for, propellant is wasted to keep the chase craft (inspector) on track.  By arranging specific segment shapes, orbital mechanics can be used as a fuel saving advantage as opposed to a drain on mission critical resources.

Our goal is to develop a path planning algorithm to schedule burns for a semi-autonomous inspection craft. This scheme will hold safety paramount while greatly reducing the propellant required to reach an inspection location around a target craft.  Keep-out-zones are used to minimize risk during calculations.  A user designates where inspection is required while on-board sensors determine the current relative state of the inspector.  The algorithm automatically pieces together navigation segments to avoid collision while proceeding to the target location.  Using low computation intensity, initial and correction trajectories can be calculated in situ.