Abstract:In the homing phase of spacecraft rendezvous and docking, in order to ensure a continuous tracking of the onboard navigation devices and to ensure a stable flight attitude of the chaser, horizontal impulses are needed as far as possible, so that the earth-orientated chaser does not tune or adjusts the attitude angle as small as possible during homing orbital control. This paper introduces an orbital maneuver attitude adjusting quantification index and gives its physical explanation and mathematic definition. According to the position and the number of times of attitude adjustment, the two-impulse rendezvous homing problem is divided into four types of cases, namely, the first maneuver without attitude adjustment, the last maneuver without attitude adjustment, the neither maneuver with attitude adjustment and the both maneuvers with attitude adjustment. Two methods to solve the above problems considering the attitude adjusting quantification index are developed. One is the iterative method applied to the first three cases, and the other is the nonlinear programming method applied to the fourth case. Four examples are calculated, and the results show that the two developed method are correct. Finally, when the contour lines of the attitude adjusting quantification index and the impulsive consumption are overlapped, the rendezvous parameter selecting map is obtained, which is instructive on rendezvous parameter selecting.