The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences

The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences is the archival journal of the American Astronautical Society, given to the science and technology of astronautics and issued four times a year with Springer handling the online edition. Its 2025 Journal Impact Factor is 1.9, placing it 27th among 59 titles in aerospace engineering.《航天科学杂志》（The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences）是美国宇航学会的档案性刊物，专注航天科学与技术，每年出四期，网络版由 Springer 承担。2025 年影响因子为 1.9，在工程宇航类目 59 种刊物中列第 27 位。

Members of the society read every issue online without charge, institutions subscribe through the publisher, and no author pays a page charge or a fee for colour figures.学会会员可免费在线阅读全部期次，机构经出版方订阅，作者不用付版面费，彩图也不额外收费。

Scope

• The aims name astronautics itself as the field, and the editors ask for significant new results, important insights or state of the art surveys rather than routine extensions of published work.宗旨把航天本身定为领域，编辑部要的是有分量的新结果、重要见解或学科现状综述，例行扩展已有工作的稿件不在其列。
• Astrodynamics holds the centre of the list, covering the design and analysis of trajectories for satellites, probes and crewed vehicles from low Earth orbit outward to the outer planets.轨道动力学居于核心，涵盖卫星、探测器与载人飞船的轨迹设计与分析，范围从近地轨道一直延伸到外行星。
• Celestial mechanics supplies the underlying theory, with papers on perturbation methods, resonance and libration point dynamics, and on the construction of analytical or semi-analytical propagators for long spans of time.天体力学提供底层理论，论文涉及摄动方法、共振与平动点动力学，也涉及长时段解析或半解析轨道递推器的构造。
• Atmospheric flight mechanics covers entry, descent and landing, aerobraking, and the guidance of manoeuvring flight vehicles, a strand that ties the journal to planetary mission engineering.大气飞行动力学覆盖进入、下降与着陆，气动制动，以及机动飞行器的制导，这一支把刊物同行星任务工程连在一起。
• Navigation and guidance papers deal with onboard estimation, star trackers and optical navigation, and the filtering that turns noisy measurements into a state the flight software can trust.导航与制导论文处理星上估计、星敏感器与光学导航，以及把含噪量测化成飞控软件可信状态的滤波方法。
• Attitude dynamics and control appear in studies of spacecraft pointing, momentum management, reaction wheel arrays and the determination that must precede any slew.姿态动力学与控制见于航天器指向、动量管理、反作用轮阵列等研究，也见于任何一次转动之前必须完成的定姿。
• Orbit determination receives steady attention, from batch least squares fitted to sparse tracking to sequential estimation for conjunction assessment and catalogue maintenance.定轨受到持续关注，从拟合稀疏跟踪数据的批处理最小二乘，到用于交会评估与编目维护的序贯估计。
• Trajectory optimization covers direct and indirect methods, low thrust transfers, gravity assists, and the numerical conditioning that decides whether a solution converges at all.轨迹优化覆盖直接法与间接法，也覆盖低推力转移、引力借力，以及决定解能否收敛的数值条件。
• Mission analysis papers weigh architecture choices, among them launch window, propellant budget, power and thermal margin, and the operations concept a design has to survive once flown.任务分析论文权衡体系选择，其中包括发射窗口、推进剂预算、电源与热控余量，以及设计上天后必须撑住的运行方案。
• Numerical methods form a category of their own, since almost every result printed in the journal rests on an integrator, an optimizer or a linear algebra step that had to be made to work.数值方法自成一类，刊物里几乎每个结果都压在一个积分器、一个优化器或一处必须调通的线性代数步骤上。
• Dynamics and control of large flexible space structures appear wherever a truss, a solar array or a tethered system refuses to behave like a rigid body.大型柔性空间结构的动力学与控制，出现在桁架、太阳翼或绳系系统不肯像刚体那样运动的场合。
• Space sciences related to new astronautical systems keep a place, so work on the radiation environment or on a sensor concept for a proposed mission can sit beside a pure astrodynamics study.与新航天系统相关的空间科学留有一席之地，辐射环境研究或为拟定任务设计的敏感器方案，可以与纯轨道动力学论文并列。
• State of the art surveys are handled as full papers rather than as a separate invited genre, and completed mission results with a documented flight record enter through the same channel.学科现状综述按正式论文处理，不单设约稿体裁，带有飞行记录的任务结果也走同一条投稿渠道。

History

• The American Astronautical Society founded the title in 1954 as an archival outlet for its own field, and the journal has carried that name without interruption since the first volume.美国宇航学会在 1954 年创办该刊，作为本领域的档案性出版物，第一卷以来刊名从未中断。
• The society's own description still opens with the phrase "published quarterly since 1954", and the volume count bears it out, volume 71 having run through 2024.学会自己的介绍至今以「自 1954 年起按季出版」开头，卷号也对得上，2024 年出到第 71 卷。
• For its first four decades the journal existed as a printed artefact of the society, and no DOI record reaches back past 1997, when the digital file begins.最初四十余年，刊物以学会的纸本形式存在，数字记录最早只到 1997 年，此前的卷次没有 DOI。
• Those early digital volumes carry Springer's 10.1007 prefix with a BF stem, and the numbering runs that way from 1997 to volume 58 in 2011.早期数字化卷次使用 Springer 的 10.1007 前缀与 BF 编号，从 1997 年一直排到 2011 年的第 58 卷。
• Volume 59, whose issues were posted in 2012 and 2013, switched to the stem s40295, the serial number Springer assigns to this title, and every article since carries it.第 59 卷的期次在 2012 至 2013 年上网，编号随之改为 s40295，那是 Springer 分配给这本刊的序列号，此后的文章一律沿用。
• Springer Science+Business Media supplies the online edition under an agreement with the society, which keeps the title, the editorial office and the copyright of what it publishes.网络版由 Springer Science+Business Media 依与学会的协议提供，刊名、编辑部与所刊文章的版权仍归学会。
• Two ISSNs run in parallel, 0021-9142 for the printed edition and 2195-0571 for the electronic one, and catalogue records list them as separate entries.两个刊号并行，纸本为 0021-9142，网络版为 2195-0571，编目记录把它们分列两条。
• A quarterly rhythm has held since the first volume, yet the numbering inside recent volumes runs past four issues, and volume 71 reached a fifth issue in 2024.季刊的节奏从第一卷延续至今，近年卷内的期次编号却越过四期，2024 年第 71 卷就排到了第 5 期。
• Access is hybrid. Subscribers pay, single articles can be opened by their authors, and gold open access accounted for 25.57 per cent of the 2025 papers.发行取混合模式，订户付费，单篇可由作者付费开放，2025 年金色开放获取论文占 25.57%。
• Impact factors over five years read 1.531 for 2021, 1.56 for 2022, 1.2 for 2023, 1.5 for 2024 and 1.9 for 2025, against a five-year figure of 1.9.近五年影响因子依次为 2021 年 1.531，2022 年 1.56，2023 年 1.2，2024 年 1.5，2025 年 1.9，五年影响因子同为 1.9。
• The 2025 ranking puts the title 27th of 59 in engineering, aerospace, a Q2 position at the 55.1 percentile, with an Article Influence Score quartile of Q2 as well.2025 年排名为工程宇航 59 种中第 27 位，居 Q2，百分位 55.1，文章影响力分值同样列 Q2。
• Total citations to the journal stood at 1351 in 2025 across 63 citable items published that year, the cited half-life reached 8.3 years and the immediacy index 0.6.2025 年全刊累计被引 1351 次，当年可引用论文 63 篇，引用半衰期 8.3 年，即年指标 0.6。
• Indexing is selective on the medical side. Science Citation Index Expanded covers the title in full, while PubMed lists selected citations under the abbreviation J Astronaut Sci.医学一侧的收录是有选择的，Science Citation Index Expanded 全文覆盖，PubMed 只录部分被引条目，缩写为 J Astronaut Sci。
• The title has not changed since 1954 and the volume numbers advance one step a year, so a citation from 1965 and one from 2024 sit in the same sequence.刊名自 1954 年未变，卷号一年进一格，1965 年的引文与 2024 年的引文落在同一串编号里。

Editors

• Maruthi Akella of the University of Texas at Austin is editor-in-chief, and the appointment sits in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics on that campus.主编为得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的 Maruthi Akella，职位挂在该校航空航天工程与工程力学系。
• Kathleen C. Howell, long based in Purdue's School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, is listed as editor-in-chief emeritus, a title that keeps the previous editorial line within reach.Kathleen C. Howell 长期在普渡大学航空航天学院任职，现列为荣休主编，这一头衔让上一任的编辑路线仍在近旁。
• Seventeen associate editors appear on the society's masthead, fifteen of them at United States institutions and two abroad, at the Politecnico di Milano and Carleton University in Ottawa.学会公布的编委名单上有十七位副编辑，其中十五位在美国机构，两位在海外，分别是米兰理工与渥太华的卡尔顿大学。
• The Jet Propulsion Laboratory supplies three of them, Rodney Anderson, Stefano Campagnola and Ryan Park, and Texas A&M two, Kyle DeMars and Manoranjan Majji, so flight dynamics carries weight in the room.喷气推进实验室占了三位（Rodney Anderson，Stefano Campagnola，Ryan Park），得州农工大学两位（Kyle DeMars，Manoranjan Majji），飞行动力学的分量由此看得出来。
• Government and industry hold seats too, among them NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland and the Naval Postgraduate School, with Blue Origin in Reston, Virginia.政府与工业界同样在编委之中，包括 NASA 马歇尔航天飞行中心、柯特兰空军基地的空军研究实验室与海军研究生院，以及弗吉尼亚州雷斯顿的 Blue Origin。
• The remaining seats read as a map of North American aerospace departments. Arizona, Central Florida and Georgia Tech hold one each, and so do MIT, Penn State and Purdue.其余席位像是北美航空航天院系的一张地图，亚利桑那大学、中佛罗里达大学与佐治亚理工各占一席，麻省理工、宾州州立和普渡同样在列。
• Manuscripts pass through Editorial Manager at editorialmanager.com/jass, the site the publisher runs for this title, and first time users register before their initial upload.稿件经 Editorial Manager 提交，入口是出版方为这本刊维护的投稿系统，新用户先注册再上传。
• No page charges apply and colour figures carry no extra fee, terms the society states plainly on its journal page for authors weighing the cost of a submission.不收版面费，彩图不另收费，学会在其刊物页面上把这两条写得很直白，作者估量投稿成本时可以直接照此盘算。
• Correspondence from the editorial office still runs through the society's headquarters in Springfield, Virginia, the address printed in the journal's own record.编辑部往来仍走学会在弗吉尼亚州斯普林菲尔德的办公地址，刊物的登记信息里印的就是这一处。
• Permission to reuse a figure or a passage is granted through the Copyright Clearance Center, a route the society points to rather than handling requests itself.复用图表或段落的许可经 Copyright Clearance Center 办理，学会把请求指向这条渠道，不自行受理。
• Editorial decisions rest with the society's editors, while production, hosting and the submission platform belong to the publisher, a division that leaves the editorial office with the scientific work alone.编辑决定留在学会的编辑手里，排版、托管与投稿平台归出版方，分工之后编辑部只管学术判断这一件事。