Liaison-supplemented navigation of a crewed vehicle in a lunar halo orbit

Abstract

This paper offers an early examination of the challenges of navigating a crewed vehicle, with all of the associated unmodeled accelerations that arise from the crew’s activities, in an orbit about the Earth-Moon L2 point. The combination of the unstable nature of libration orbits with the lack of acceleration knowledge makes the station keeping strategy challenging. It is found that a combination of ground tracking and satellite-to-satellite tracking produces the most favorable navigation accuracy. This paper examines the costs and benefits of applying LiAISON (Linked Autonomous Interplanetary Satellite Orbit Navigation) to a crewed mission in an unstable L2 orbit.