Earth-Mars transfers through Moon distant retrograde orbits

Conte, Davide and Di Carlo, Marilena and Ho, Koki and Spencer, David B. and Vasile, Massimiliano (2015) Earth-Mars transfers through Moon distant retrograde orbits. In: AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference 2015, 2015-08-09 - 2015-08-13, Colorado.

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Abstract

This paper focuses on trajectory design which is relevant for missions that would follow NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) to further explore and utilise asteroids and eventually human Mars exploration. Assuming that a refueling gas station is present at a given Lunar Distant Retrograde Orbit (DRO), we analyse ways of departing from the Earth to Mars via that DRO. Thus, the analysis and results presented in this paper add a new cis-lunar departure orbit for Earth-Mars missions. Porkchop plots depicting the required C3 at launch, v1 at arrival, Time of Flight (TOF), and total ∆V for various DRO departure and Mars arrival dates are created and compared with results obtained for low ∆V LEO to Mars trajectories. The results show that low ∆V DRO to Mars transfers generally have lower ∆V and TOF than LEO to Mars maneuvers.

ORCID iDs

Conte, Davide, Di Carlo, Marilena ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5046-3028, Ho, Koki, Spencer, David B. and Vasile, Massimiliano ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8302-6465;
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