A STUDY OF OPTIMAL ROUND TRIP TRAJECTORIES TO THE MOON AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE SUN
Luiz Arthur Gagg Filho1; Sandro da Silva Fernandes1
1 Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica
doi:10.20906/CPS/COB-2015-0396
Resumo
In the last two decades, new kinds of trajectories have been proposed in order to transfer a space vehicle from a low Earth orbit (LEO) to a low Moon orbit (LMO). This work studies and compares several models to determine optimal bi-impulsive trajectories in a round trip journey to the Moon which minimize the fuel consumption, represented by the total velocity increment applied to the space vehicle. The velocity increments are assumed to be impulsive and are applied tangentially to the terminal orbits. The models considered in this work are four: the lunar patched-conic approximation, the simplified and the classic planar circular restricted three-body problem (PCR3BP), and, the planar bi-circular restricted four-body problem (PBR4BP). The Sequential Gradient-Restoration algorithm with constraints, developed by Miele and collaborators, is used to determine the optimal trajectories.
Palavras-chave: Optimal Earth-Moon trajectories; round trip lunar missions; patched-conic approximation; three-body problem; four-body problem