Integrated orbit determination and maintenance in Earth-Moon unstable dynamics environment

Abstract

The hyperbolic instability of collinear libration point orbits dominates the distribution of orbit uncertainty, which is closely related with the unstable manifold of the local orbit. Exploiting the distribution of orbit uncertainty in an unstable orbital environment, an integrated orbit determination and maintenance approach is proposed. X-ray pulsar navigation embedded in the Kalman filtering architecture is adopted to determine the orbit of a spacecraft flying along the Earth-Moon L2 halo orbit. To keep the spacecraft in the vicinity of the nominal trajectory, the newly proposed orbit maintenance approach based on the covariance matrix is proposed to design the orbit maintenance maneuver. The numerical simulations show that the proposed approach has a good performance in orbit determination and maintenance.