Rendezvous in Cis-Lunar Space near Rectilinear Halo Orbit: Dynamics and Control Issues

The paper presents the development of a fully-safe, automatic rendezvous strategy between a passive vehicle and an active one orbiting around the Earth–Moon L2 Lagrangian point. This is one of the critical phases of future missions to permanently return to the Moon, which are of interest to the majority of space organizations. The first step in the study is the derivation of a suitable full 6-DOF relative motion model in the Local Vertical Local Horizontal reference frame, most suitable for the design of the guidance. The main dynamic model is approximated using both the elliptic and circular three-body motion, due to the contribution of Earth and Moon gravity. A rather detailed set of sensors and actuator dynamics was also implemented in order to ensure the reliability of the guidance algorithms. The selection of guidance and control is presented, and evaluated using a sample scenario as described by ESA’s HERACLES program. The safety, in particular the passive safety, concept is introduced and different techniques to guarantee it are discussed that exploit the ideas of stable and unstable manifolds to intrinsically guarantee some properties at each hold-point, in which the rendezvous trajectory is divided. Finally, the rendezvous dynamics are validated using available Ephemeris models in order to verify the validity of the results and their limitations for future more detailed design.