Exploiting manifolds of L1 halo orbits for end-to-end Earth–Moon low-thrust trajectory design

Abstract In this work, we study end-to-end low-thrust transfers from a GTO orbit to a low-altitude lunar orbit by exploiting the manifolds of a chosen Earth-Moon L 1 halo orbit. The practicality of piece-wise, minimum-time transfers that exploit halo orbit manifolds is demonstrated, which offers more flexibility to meet mission objectives. It is known that the structure of the manifolds varies substantially due to the presence of the Sun and its contribution has to be considered to obtain more realistic trajectories. To incorporate Sun’s perturbation, we study (1) manifolds’ behavior within a Bi-Circular Problem (BCP) dynamics and (2) Sun’s impact on the previously converged trajectories obtained using the standard Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem (CR3BP). Comparisons of the resulting trajectories using the CR3BP and BCP are presented.