Flexible Bridge-Conic Strategies for Moon-to-Moon Analytical Transfer Design

The multi-burn transfer framework based on the moon-to-moon analytical transfer method allows rapid patching of low-energy trajectories in the vicinity of different moons in a planetary system. However, the semimajor axis and eccentricity of intermediate arcs of one transfer mission are fixed in the existent multi-burn strategies. Additional propellant consumption is required to enable the transfers at all departure epochs, and a nonanalytical formulation still remains for transferring to spatial periodic orbits. To address these difficulties, new multi-burn strategies with variable intermediate arcs are proposed to meet the transfer conditions for different types of arrival orbits. Specifically, one or two intermediate arcs with one variable parameter are introduced and can be determined analytically. In numerical simulations, the proposed flexible bridge-conic strategies are applied to design transfers between libration point orbits in both the Jovian and Saturnian systems. Final results validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategies and indicate the important advantage in propellant saving compared with the existent multi-burn strategies.