A Fealsible Strategy for Building Distant Retrograde Orbits

Abstract

Specific application of satellites require the building and maintenance of orbits with high altitude. In these cases, conventional orbital transfer methods may prove to be infeasible, especially with respect to fuel consumption. In this work we present an alternative strategy for an orbital transfer of a spacecraft from a low circular orbit to a high and retrograde orbit in the Earth-Moon System. Considering a four-body scenario, the technique consists in the use of appropriate perturbations applied around unstable periodic orbits predicted in the Restricted Three-Body Problem (R3BP), associated with the exploration of the sensitive dependence of the transition regions between capture and escape in the Earth-Moon System. In addition to small transfer times, the results obtained show that it is possible to obtain stable high and inclined final orbits with a low cost in terms of increment of velocity.