The use of Taylor Series Integration (TSI) for the propagation of spacecraft trajectories and its combination with the relatively unknown Unified State Model (USM) coordinate system, resulting in the TSI-USM propagator, is known to allow fast propagation of interplanetary low-thrust trajectories. Unfortunately, the TSI-USM propagator is a problem-specific method, which is detrimental for its use in evolutionary algorithms.

In this thesis, a method was developed to generalize the TSI-USM propagator. The TSI-USM was generalized to allow the propagation of a spacecraft trajectory in a central gravitational field subject to any pre-set thrust profile, without the need to adapt the internal working of the propagator. The three-dimensional thrust profile should be specified a priori, and with respect to time, by the user or by an evolutionary algorithm. The method used to generalize the TSI-USM requires the coefficients of the cubic spline interpolation of the pre-set thrust profile to compute the recurrence relations of the TSI-USM.

Results show that, although the method indeed generalizes the TSI-USM, it is less accurate and requires more CPU time for a given accuracy than existing RK8(7)13M-based propagators. From this result, it can be expected that future attempts to generalize the TSI-USM propagator, without sacrificing its accuracy and computational speed, will be challenging. ... Read more