Solar sail periodic orbit design using collocation in the circular restricted three-body problem

Abstract:

Considering the orbit design of a solar sail in the circular restricted three-body problem(CRTBP), the sail attitude and lightness parameter required for stationary solutions and the artificial libration surfaces are investigated. For there is very little intuition about the solution space of the periodic orbit near most artificial libration points, higher-order collocation is utilized to discretize the solution to the equations of motion. This approach converts the original problem to a finite-dimensional nonlinear programming problem with a finite set of variables. The calculation results demonstrate the availability of the approach in generating periodic orbits in solar sail CRTBP as well as its robustness to the initial guess.