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Repeat Ground Track Lunar Orbits in the Full-Potential Plus Third-Body ProblemA 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. .
Document ID
20060051524
Acquisition Source
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Document Type
Preprint (Draft being sent to journal)
External Source(s)
Authors
Russell, Ryan P.
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Lara, Martin
(Real Observatorio de la Armada San Fernando, Spain)
Date Acquired
August 23, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 2006
Subject Category
Astrodynamics
Report/Patent Number
AIAA Paper 2006-6750
Report Number: AIAA Paper 2006-6750
Meeting Information
Meeting: AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference
Location: Keystone, CO
Country: United States
Start Date: August 1, 2006
Sponsors: American Astronomical Society, American Inst. of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other
Keywords
periodic
repeat ground tracking
Moon
CEV
frozen
mapping

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