Realistic Guidance Performance during Lunar Rendezvous with Third Body Perturbation

The paper describes the performance of a guidance law based on the Adjoint and SDRE methods in presence of reality representative models of sensors and actuators during the rendezvous phase of the proposed Heracles mission to the Moon. In recent years, the increased interest in returning to the Moon has motivated the necessity to develop accurate models for the analysis of missions that takes into account realistic system components. The paper reviews the mission’s details, the rendezvous/berthing guidance algorithm with third body perturbation, and sensor’s and actuators state of the art models. A Montecarlo analysis is used to validate the models in order to satisfy the safety of the trajectory. The results show that the proposed guidance and control are capable of maintaining safe relative motion between the vehicles.