Book Description

In the context of Human Spaceflight exploration mission scenario, with the Deep Space Gateway (DSG) on a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) about Earth-Moon Lagrangian Point (EML), Rendezvous and Docking (RVD) operational activities are mandatory and critical for assembly of the DSG to be performed by the Orion spacecraft. Orion will also handle cargo delivery and crew exchange missions and they all require RVD. There is extensive experience with RVD in the two-body problem in Low Earth Orbit to various space stations or around Low Lunar Orbit quasi circular, the latter by Apollo in manual RVD. Despite that no operational RVD has yet been performed in the vicinity of the Lagrangian points, where Keplerian dynamics is not applicable. There are some drawbacks from the complexity, but also some strong advantages that need to be researched in depth by the work proposed here. Despite vast literature on families of trajectories about the Lagrangian points and transfers in the Cis-Lunar realm, the scientific community has, at the moment, very few relevant research results in the non Keplerian dynamic domain. However, in recent years one can be seen the emergence of some sparse publications on the subject, which can be explained by the studies related to DSG and Orion missions. Within the partners, semi-analytical tools have been developed to compute and model families of orbits like NRHO, DRO, Lyapunov, Halo and Lissajous about the Lagrangian points in the Circular Restricted Three Body Problem (CR3BP). Hence there is a good starting point for the research for the overall rendezvous strategy considering vehicle and operations constraints. The proposed PhD project is expected to further and strengthen the work already carried out and some of the celestial mechanics tools developed. Further to that research shall be performed regarding the GNC design for such missions and the accuracies that can be achieved with today technologies and what is required. Assuming the DSG to be the target, RVD will be performed in this project by visiting vehicles arriving from the Earth.