Toward immersive spacecraft trajectory design: Mapping user drawings to natural periodic orbits

Abstract

This paper presents an immersive spacecraft trajectory design application within the cislunar space domain. The long-term goal of this application is to enable users to design spacecraft trajectories by drawing curves while immersed in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual reality replica of the Earth–Moon system. In this framework, visual memory or understanding of orbit dynamics may be directly linked to the creation of trajectory baselines for preliminary mission design with 3D drawings. An orthogonal-collocation-based optimizer maps user-drawn curves to approximate orbit solutions that are feasible under the natural dynamics of the Earth–Moon system. The natural dynamics of the Earth–Moon system are modeled using a circular-restricted three-body problem (CR3BP) model. Two experiments are conducted to initially assess the feasibility of the proposed trajectory design framework and to determine the robustness of the optimizer in the presence of user-induced distortions within the 3D user drawings. The first experiment establishes that it may be feasible to map a user-drawn curve to a close natural CR3BP trajectory. In fact, during the experiment, sample user-drawn curves were mapped to natural CR3BP orbits with a seventy-five percent success rate. The second experiment establishes baseline statistics for user-induced distortions over one hundred and three user-drawn traces of a sample L2 halo reference orbit. Based on these statistics, a final analysis provides a quantitative measure in verification of the robustness of the optimizer when user-induced distortions are present. Hence the proposed immersive computing framework is deemed suitable for further development for trajectory design in cislunar space.