Toronto team cuts lunar stationkeeping propellant 12.5%

(SpaceEnergy) University of Toronto researchers have developed a lunar orbit-maintenance strategy that reduced modelled stationkeeping propellant requirements by 12.5% compared with conventional circularisation.

The approach exploits lunar mass concentrations, or mascons, which perturb low lunar orbits and can drive spacecraft towards surface impact within months. Instead of simply correcting those disturbances, the researchers modelled manoeuvres that use favourable perturbations to help restore the orbit.

For a representative 50km circular polar lunar orbit, the optimisation produced a six-thrust maintenance strategy requiring 10.5m/s of delta-v per lunation, compared with 12.0m/s for a conventional two-burn circularisation approach.

The researchers said the method could extend mission life, reduce propulsion-system requirements or allow more spacecraft mass to be allocated to payloads on future cislunar missions.

The work was presented at the Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 25 August.