Low-thrust transfer to the Earth-Moon triangular libration point via horseshoe orbit

Leveraging L3 to transfer to L4 in the Sun-perturbed Earth-Moon system

“…Taking advantage of the invariant manifolds of LPOs in the CR3BP, Elliott et al [16] and Sullivan et al [17] designed a low-thrust-enabled trajectory to the Sun-Earth L5 region. Based on the horseshoe orbits encircling triangular libration points and L3, the pseudospectral method and the tangential thrust control strategy are introduced to optimize two kinds of trajectories from the Earth to Earth-Moon triangular libration points, respectively [18]. The low-thrust fuel-optimal transfers from Halo orbits to periodic orbits around Earth-Moon triangular libration points are obtained by an indirect optimization technique incorporated with constraint gradients [19].…”