Long-term capture of asteroids to the Sun-Earth L1/L2 using a lunar flyby and station-keeping maneuvers

Abstract

Long-term capture of near-Earth asteroids to Sun-Earth L1/L2 libration point orbits using a lunar flyby and station-keeping maneuvers is investigated in this paper. The model of the circular restricted three-body problem (CR3BP) provides reference L1/L2 libration point orbits and stable manifolds to capture asteroids. A station-keeping method using target points is employed to maintain the final periodic orbits under the Moon’s perturbation. Then the stable manifold with the Moon’s perturbation is applied to achieve transfers for capturing candidate asteroids. After candidate asteroids are selected using the non-planar Hohmann transfer, optimizations of capturing asteroids are carried out by minimizing the sum of transfer costs and station-keeping maneuvers. Simulation results show that the lunar flyby can reduce the fuel consumption of capturing asteroids, even when the station-keeping maneuvers are taken into account.