Rossonero: a tool for preliminary rendezvous mission design in the restricted three-body problem

ROSSONERO (Rendezvous Operations Simulation Software on Near Rectilinear Orbit) is a realistic simulation tool developed in MATLAB/Simulink for preliminary design of rendezvous/docking/berthing manoeuvres between two spacecraft in three-body problem scenarios, with particular focuse on the Earth-Moon system and development of a space station in cis-lunar space. The peculiarity of the lunar environment, and the critical aspects of the rendezvous operations require the availability of dedicated predictive simulation tools, for dynamics and control analysis as well as overall mission assessment. ROSSONERO is based on a complete set of 6-DOF relative motion equations expressed in the local-vertical local-horizon (LVLH) frame and under elliptic restricted three-body problem (ER3BP) hypothesis. A graphical user interface allows the user to set up the simulation, define the mission and simulate the mission execution, as well as analyze and plot the results. In this paper, we present the tool structure and we show its effectiveness by showing the results for two examples of rendezvous mission in lunar orbit.