Autonomous low-thrust guidance: application to SMART-1 and BepiColombo.

Several techniques have been developed to obtain optimum trajectories with low-thrust propulsion. However, few low-thrust guidance schemes have been investigated to fly the reference optimum trajectories. The guidance algorithm successfully employed in the DeepSpace1 mission was the first approximation through the presented guidance schemes, valid for various interplanetary low-thrust trajectories, independently of the optimization technique they result from.