A method for entry vehicle's maneuver capacity analysis and evaluation

Maneuver capacity provides crucial information for mission planning of entry vehicles. This paper proposes a method to generate the reachable area at the end points of the entry phase which describes the full directional maneuver capacity of the entry vehicles. This method utilizes the parallel characteristics of differential evolution (DE) and the high accuracy of Chebyshev polynomial interpolation to generate one side of the boundary of the reachable area, while conventional methods only generate one point of the boundary in each run. Furthermore, in order to assess the influence of the vehicle's design parameters on the maneuver capacity, a scoring method with analytic hierarchy process (AHP), which can greatly reduce the evaluation effort, is developed.