A high degree and order Lunar gravitational field is superimposed on the Earth-Moon Restricted Three Body model to capture the dominating forces on a spacecraft in the vicinity of the Moon. For the synchronously rotating Moon, periodic orbits in this model map repeat ground tracks and represent higher order solutions to the frozen orbit problem. The near-circular, stable or near-stable solutions are found over a wide range of defining characteristics making them suitable for long-lifetime parking applications such as science orbits, crew exploration vehicle parking orbits, and global coverage constellation orbits. A full ephemeris is considered for selected orbits to evaluate the validity of the time-invariant, simplified model. Of the most promising results are the low-altitude families of near-circular, inclined orbits that maintain long-term stability despite the highly non-spherical Lunar gravity. The method is systematic and enables rapid design and analysis of long-life orbits around any tidally-locked celestial body with an arbitrarily high degree and order spherical harmonic gravity field. .


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    Title :

    Repeat Ground Track Lunar Orbits in the Full-Potential Plus Third-Body Problem


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference ; 2006 ; Keystone, CO, United States


    Publication date :

    2006-01-01


    Type of media :

    Preprint


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English





    Repeat Ground Track Lunar Orbits in the Full-Potential Plus Third-Body Problem AIAA Paper 2006-6750

    Russell, R. / Lara, M. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2006


    Long-Lifetime Lunar Repeat Ground Track Orbits.

    Russell, R.P. | Online Contents | 2007


    Long-Lifetime Lunar Repeat Ground Track Orbits

    Ryan Russell / Martin Lara | AIAA | 2007


    Fast design of repeat ground track orbits in high-fidelity geopotentials

    Lara, Martin / Russell, Ryan P. | Springer Verlag | 2008