HIPERSONIC TRIDIMENSIONAL SKIP: USE OF UNIFORM EXPONENTIAL DICOTOMIES IN THE DEFINITION OF A BAND OF AERODYNAMIC CONTROL PARAMETERS FOR MANEUVERS INDUCTION
Starting from theoretical exploits presented some two decades ago, this research seeks to assess the practical possibility of systematizing the selection of aerodynamic control parameters to be employed in the analytical determination hence, subsequently, in the injection of a particular class of hypersonic transatmospheric maneuvers. These are the so-called three-dimensional skip trajectories. In the process, we discuss extensively some notable mistakes found in the published literature. As the maneuvers under scrutiny have been shown, in a broader, generalized sense, to be nonautonomous (i.e., in some sense, ‘time’-varying), with the coefficients of the equations of motion being themselves dependent upon some of the state variables of the problem, we chose as a mathematical tool for the effective selection of said parameters the concept of uniform exponential dichotomies. These are constructed in terms of the state vector of our problem. In fact, such an approach constitutes one of the notable and, to some extent, innovative features of this thesis. In reality, the very treatment of the problem at hand via exponential dichotomies is, itself, a novelty of this work.