Design and applications of solar sail periodic orbits in the non-autonomous Earth-Moon system

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Heiligers, Maria and Macdonald, Malcolm and Parker, Jeffrey S. (2015) Design and applications of solar sail periodic orbits in the non-autonomous Earth-Moon system. In: AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference 2015, 2015-08-09 - 2015-08-13, Colorado.

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Abstract

Solar sailing has great potential for a range of high-energy and long duration mis-sions in the Sun-Earth system. This paper extends this potential to the non-autonomous Earth-Moon system through the use of a differential correction scheme, and by selecting suitable in-plane and out-of-plane sail steering laws to develop new families of solar sail libration point orbits that are periodic with the Sun’s motion around the Earth-Moon system. New orbits include those that bifur-cate from the natural Lyapunov, halo and eight-shaped orbit families at the first and second Lagrange points. The potential of these orbits is demonstrated by con-sidering the performance of a subset of orbits for high-latitude Earth observations, lunar far-side communications, and lunar South Pole coverage.

ORCID iDs

Heiligers, Maria, Macdonald, Malcolm ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4499-4281 and Parker, Jeffrey S.;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)