Markov-Jump-Based Control for Trajectory Design Robust to Missed Thrust Events

Low-thrust spacecraft trajectories are susceptible to missed thrust events, which can compromise mission objectives if they occur at critical phases. Current practices in mission design are mostly ad hoc, which have no safety guarantees while also being suboptimal. Markov Jump based control provides a powerful framework to model it as a stochastic switching system, and design optimal control laws for such systems with safety guarantees. Current research focuses on extending Markov jump theory to allow for path constraints in a minimum fuel or minimum energy problem and analyze its performance through Monte Carlo simulations in linear dynamics. Future work would extend it to finite-horizon linear time varying dynamics with the eventual goal of extending it to nonlinear dynamics.