Abstract
Solar sailing has great potential for a range of high-energy and long duration mis-sions in the Sun-Earth system. This paper extends this potential to the non-autonomous Earth-Moon system through the use of a differential correction scheme, and by selecting suitable in-plane and out-of-plane sail steering laws to develop new families of solar sail libration point orbits that are periodic with the Sun’s motion around the Earth-Moon system. New orbits include those that bifur-cate from the natural Lyapunov, halo and eight-shaped orbit families at the first and second Lagrange points. The potential of these orbits is demonstrated by con-sidering the performance of a subset of orbits for high-latitude Earth observations, lunar far-side communications, and lunar South Pole coverage.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Publication status | Published - 10 Aug 2015 |
| Event | AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference 2015 - Colorado, Vail, United States Duration: 9 Aug 2015 → 13 Aug 2015 |
Conference
| Conference | AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference 2015 |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| City | Vail |
| Period | 9/08/15 → 13/08/15 |
Keywords
- solar sailing
- earth-moon libration points
- high latitude observation
- lunar south pole observation
- lunar far side observation
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Heiligers, M., Macdonald, M., & Parker, J. S. (2015). Design and applications of solar sail periodic orbits in the non-autonomous Earth-Moon system. Paper presented at AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference 2015, Vail, United States.