ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

Near Rectilinear Orbits (NRO) are a potential candidate for future exploration missions, due to their appealing features. They guarantee a large visibility window from Earth, low delta-v access requirements, low station keeping costs, and cheap access to the lunar surface, thus proving effective as staging orbits for lunar support orbiting infrastructures as well as intermediate parking trajectories for interplanetary travels. The paper presents and compares some station keeping techniques, with spectrum-based methods and targeting schemes, showing their potentiality and robustness in uncertain perturbed environments. Both semi-analytical and numerical tools are presented, recalling some already existing techniques and comparing the results with the novel methods described. The results are presented for different sets of orbits and strategies, in order to create a catalog of the operational possibilities offered by this orbital family and their related cost. The external perturbations are assumed as unknown, together with a given level of system noise during the orbital propagation; state determination errors are included as well, investigating the capability of the station keeping technique to counteract their effect as deviation from the nominal trajectory. Some hints are also provided on possible future studies, to enhance the performances of the presented algorithms and guarantee cheaper and more robust results.