Study of the transfer between libration point orbits and lunar orbits in Earth–Moon system

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the study of the transfer problem from a libration point orbit of the Earth-Moon system to an orbit around the Moon. The transfer procedure analysed has two legs: the first one is an orbit of the unstable manifold of the libration orbit and the second one is a transfer orbit between a certain point on the manifold and the final lunar orbit. There are only two manoeuvres involved in the method and they are applied at the beginning and at the end of the second leg. Although the numerical results given in this paper correspond to transfers between halo orbits around the L 1 point (of several amplitudes) and lunar polar orbits with altitudes varying between 100 and 500 km, the procedure we develop can be applied to any kind of lunar orbits, libration orbits around the L 1 or L 2 points of the Earth-Moon system, or to other similar cases with different values of the mass ratio.

A picture of solar-sail heteroclinic enhanced connections between Lissajous libration point orbits

“…LPO are very useful for Sun and space observations including a rich variety of sizes and shapes (see [18] and references therein). Even that, in the same basis, the present analysis could be also made for LPO about SL 1 , we have considered Lissajous orbits around collinear libration points SL 2 , that can be more popular in terms of the number of potential missions, and in view of the current Chinese Change'E series [23,24,25]. Moreover, transfers between Lissajous orbits are advantageous for reaching higher or lower amplitude sizes, for avoiding escape from the nominal orbit (due to their inherent instability), for avoiding forbidden zones, such as the ones related to eclipse avoidance for missions around L 1 , or for avoiding the Earth shadow cone for missions around the L 2 point [26].…”