A review of low-energy transfers

Abstract

Low-energy transfers (LET) for lunar and interplanetary missions has received immense attention of the scientific community during the last few decades as its importance was understood by the success of JAXA's Hiten, ESA's SMART-1, NASA's GRAIL and ARTHEMIS missions, and several proposals, like the BepiColombo, Multi-Moon Orbiter and Europa Orbiter. In this paper the developments in the area of LET and low-thrust trajectories are reviewed. Starting with the basics of the restricted three-body problem and its use in finding invariant manifolds in phase space, the design of LET trajectories and optimisation methods used to find optimal LET and low-thrust transfers is discussed.