Stationkeeping in Earth-Moon Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits

Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits (NRHOs) are stable or nearly stable orbits that are defined as part of the L1 and L2 halo orbit families in the circular restricted three-body problem. Within the Earth-Moon regime, the L2 NRHOs offer candidate trajectories for the upcoming Gateway mission. The spacecraft, however, incurs continuous deviations due to unmodeled forces and orbit determination errors in this dynamically sensitive region. The current investigation focuses on a technique to maintain the spacecraft near a virtual reference orbit despite these uncertainties. For the stationkeeping scheme, flow dynamics in the region are utilized to categorically identify appropriate maneuver and target locations. The investigation reflects the impact of various factors on maneuver cost and efficacy. Additional feedback control is applied for phasing constraints.