Trajectory design for the transfer from the Lissajous orbit of sun-earth system to asteroids

This paper investigates the trajectory design issue for the transfer from the Lissajous orbit of CHANG'E 2 probe to asteroids. First, an intersection search method, which is a general design method of low-energy transfer trajectories by searching the intersection of unstable and stable manifolds in the circular restricted three-body problem (CRTBP), is applied to produce the zero-cost flyby trajectories for the asteroid flyby missions of CHANG'E 2 probe, and the simulation result shows that this method is invalid. Then, for this trajectories design issue, a perturbation method, which consists of a process of searching initial trajectories by applying velocity perturbations in the direction of unstable eigenvectors of the Lissajous orbit and a trajectory correction process with two-level differential correction, is proposed. Finally, the transfer opportunities between the Lissajous orbit of CHANG'E 2 and asteroids Toutatis and 2010 JK1 are searched by the perturbation method. The results show that the method proposed in this paper can identify low-energy transfer trajectories for asteroid flyby missions of CHANG'E 2. Moreover, this method provides a global understanding of the trend of impulsive maneuvers over the transfer date.