Abstract
The ARTEMIS mission takes two of the five THEMIS spacecraft beyond their prime mission objectives and reuses them to study the Moon and the lunar space environment. Although the spacecraft and fuel resources were tailored to space observations from Earth orbit, sufficient fuel margins, spacecraft capability, and operational flexibility were present that with a circuitous, ballistic, constrained-thrust trajectory, new scientific information could be gleaned from the instruments near the Moon and in lunar orbit. We discuss the challenges of ARTEMIS trajectory design and describe its current implementation to address both heliophysics and planetary science objectives. In particular, we explain the challenges imposed by the constraints of the orbiting hardware and describe the trajectory solutions found in prolonged ballistic flight paths that include multiple lunar approaches, lunar flybys, low-energy trajectory segments, lunar Lissajous orbits, and low-lunar-periapse orbits. We conclude with a discussion of the risks that we took to enable the development and implementation of ARTEMIS.
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Acknowledgements
The work described in this paper was carried out in part at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The authors would like to recognize and compliment the outstanding contributions of the THEMIS/ARTEMIS science team, the ARTEMIS mission design team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the ARTEMIS navigation and maneuver design team at Goddard Space Flight Center, and the THEMIS/ARTEMIS navigation, maneuver design, and operations team at the University of California-Berkeley Space Science Laboratory to the successful development and implementation (so far) of the ARTEMIS mission. Judy Hohl, our editor at UCLA, and Emmanuel Masongsong, our graphics editor at UCLA, contributed significantly to the readability of this paper. The maneuver data in the tables above were supplied by Dan Cosgrove, the THEMIS/ARTEMIS Navigation Lead.
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Sweetser, T.H., Broschart, S.B., Angelopoulos, V. et al. ARTEMIS Mission Design. Space Sci Rev 165, 27–57 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-012-9869-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-012-9869-1