The recently investigated asso model predictive control (MPC) is applied to the terminal phase of a spacecraft rendezvous and capture mission. The interaction between the cost function and the treatment of minimum impulse bit (MIB) is also investigated. The propellant consumption with asso MPC for the considered scenario is noticeably less than with a conventional quadratic cost and control actions are sparser in time. Propellant consumption and sparsity are competitive with those achieved

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... a zone-based 1 cost function, whilst requiring fewer decision variables in the optimisation problem than the latter. The asso MPC is demonstrated to meet tighter specifications on control precision, and also avoids the risk of undesirable behaviours often associated with pure 1 stage costs.