Over the next two decades international space agencies including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Space Agency are proposing space missions which employ distributed spacecraft technologies to enable vast improvements in remote sensing performance as compared to fundamental performance limitations associated with fairing sizes of even the largest launch vehicles. A key initial step towards enabling such challenging missions is the development of processes and algorithms for designing the desired motion of the spacecraft formation subject to simultaneous gravitational and fuel constraints. In this paper we develop analogous methodologies for designing trajectories of relative motion near the L(sub 2) point as have been thoroughly developed for the Earth-orbiting regime. In this preliminary study, we confine ourselves to the basic assumptions of the Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem where disturbances, non-gravitational effects, and fourth and greater body affects are ignored. The focus is on determining formations that are defined primarily by the natural gravitational effects on the vehicles, such that maintenance over long-term will not require significant fuel consumption.
Spacecraft Formation Design Near the Sun-Earth L(sub 2) Point
AIAA GN and C Conference ; 2004 ; Providence, RI, United States
2003-12-23
Preprint
No indication
English
Spacecraft Formation Design Near the Sun-Earth L2 Point
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