Impulsive Rendezvous Maneuvers in the Restricted Three-Body Problem

The present international cooperation scenario for robotic and human space exploration is focusing on mission architectures that revolve around building and exploiting a crew-tended cis-lunar space station, known as Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway. Candidate orbits for this vehicle are the near rectilinear halo orbits (NRHO). As a consequence, the capability to inject in NRHO and perform rendezvous and docking or berthing maneuvers with a station in NRHO is key to many future exploration missions. This paper analyzes the dynamic behavior of relative chaser-target motion in NRHO under the influence of impulsive thrust maneuvers with respect to a local-vertical local-horizon (LVLH) frame. Rendezvous trajectories are defined to achieve rendezvous in both the periselene and aposelene regions of the NRHO, which make use of orbital maneuvers defined using the adjoint method, to address the presence of time-varying parameters in the guidance problem.