Design and Applications of Solar Sail Periodic Orbits in the Non-Autonomous Earth-Moon System

Conference paper (2015)

Authors

M.J. Heiligers Astrodynamics & Space Missions - Aerospace Engineering , University of Strathclyde
M. MacDonald University of Strathclyde
Jeffrey S. Parker University of Colorado
Research Group
Astrodynamics & Space Missions (Aerospace Engineering) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2015 M.J. Heiligers, Malcolm Macdonald, Jeffrey S. Parker
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

2015

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Aerospace Engineering

Department

Space Engineering

Research Group

Astrodynamics & Space Missions

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.

Files

7_Conf_ASC2015_designAndApplSo... (pdf)
(pdf | 2.22 Mb)
Unknown license