Leveraging stretching directions for stationkeeping in Earth-Moon halo orbits

Abstract

Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits (NRHOs) are stable or nearly stable orbits that are defined as part of the L1 and L2 halo orbit families in the circular restricted three-body problem. Within the Earth-Moon regime, the L1 and L2 NRHOs are proposed as long horizon trajectories for cislunar exploration missions, including NASA’s upcoming Gateway mission. The spacecraft, however, incurs continuous deviations due to unmodeled forces and orbit determination errors in this dynamically sensitive region. The current investigation focuses on an impulsive stationkeeping technique to maintain the spacecraft near a virtual reference orbit despite these uncertainties. The flow dynamics in the region are utilized to identify appropriate maneuver and target locations. The investigation reflects the impact of various factors on maneuver cost and efficacy. For orbits where position and velocity states are particularly sensitive to epoch time, an additional feedback control strategy is applied for phasing constraints.