The Influence of Launch Conditions on the Feasibility and Design of Trajectories in Cislunar Space

• Grant number: 23/04386-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2023
• End date: November 30, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Aerospace Engineering - Flight Dynamics
• Principal Investigator: Maisa de Oliveira Terra
• Grantee: Caio Jansen Accioly
• Host Institution: Divisão de Engenharia Aeronáutica (IEA). Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA). Ministério da Defesa (Brasil). São José dos Campos , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 23/15747-6 - Cislunar Trajectory Design in Realistic Ephemeris Model, BE.EP.IC

Abstract

With the current heightened global interest in lunar missions, new trajectories that facilitate or lower the cost of a space flight can have a huge impact. In this scenario, the circular restricted three-body problem (CRTBP) has been exploited, given that it models in a good first approximation the nonlinearity of the cislunar gravitational field and the trajectories and orbits populating it. In any lunar mission, transfer trajectories are essential. By exploiting the hyperbolic structures present in the CRTBP phase space, in particular, computing the stable and unstable manifolds of chosen solutions, Earth-Moon transfers can be built, as an instance. In these cases, low-cost maneuvers usually are required to patch solutions of distinct CRTBP systems, and additionally, ballistic capture may lower costs even further at arrival. In other cases, the computation of a heteroclinic connection (null cost) is obtained by the intersection of stable and unstable manifolds of hyperbolic orbits of interest in the same energy level at the phase space. However, these trajectories in the simplified CRTBP system are only approximations of the real multi-body dynamics, so they must be refined to more realistic models before further analyses. In the process of refining the trajectories, different conditions of launch, previously ignored in the simpler model, start to influence the cost of the mission. Such conditions, such as the real relative position of the Sun, Earth, and Moon, the inclination of the orbits, launch time, and other gravitational bodies, directly influence the total cost of the maneuvers and the final mission trajectory. Therefore, the objective of this project is to determine the relations between these different launch conditions to the fuel efficiency in modern lunar missions.