Long-Duration Station-Keeping Strategy for Cislunar Spacecraft Formations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new guidance and control strategy for maintaining spacecraft formations in cislunar space, ensuring safety and stability over long durations using advanced control techniques and high-fidelity simulations.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach combining invariant circles, absolute and relative control laws, and control barrier functions for long-duration formation-keeping in cislunar space.

Findings

Strategy maintains bounded relative motion in high-fidelity simulations.

Control barrier functions ensure safety despite missed maneuvers.

Monte Carlo trials validate robustness and effectiveness.

Abstract

This paper demonstrates a novel guidance and control strategy for cislunar near-rectilinear halo orbit formation-keeping applied to high-fidelity dynamics. Bounded relative motion is constructed about long-duration ephemeris trajectories with osculating invariant circles to form quasi-periodic relative orbits. State-of-the-art absolute control strategies are paired with a simple and effective relative control feedback law. Finally, a control barrier function is implemented to ensure recursively passively-safe bounded relative motion under feedback in the presence of possible missed maneuver events for the duration of the formation flight. The strategy is verified in high-fidelity simulation environments through Monte Carlo trials.