Abstract:

The upcoming deployment of the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G) on a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) calls for reliable, low-cost strategies for station keeping and relative motion tailor-made for NRHO. This paper proposes a control approach which harnesses the eigenvectors of state transition matrices (STM) associated with a high-fidelity NRHO solution in the ephemeris model to design long-term station keeping and bounded relative motion. The proposed method effectively utilizes the natural motion of the spacecraft so that control actions are infrequent and fuel efficient. The performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated via simulations with a state estimator that uses simulated mea- surements from the Deep Space Network.