EARTH-MOON MULTIPURPOSE ORBITING INFRASTRUCTURE

Nowadays interest on large structures, ISS like, to serve for a long time as orbiting outposts place in strategic, possibly long-term stable locations is increasing. They can serve as a support for far target robotic\manned missions, for planetary tele-operated robotic surface activities, as scientific labs for sample return missions in preserved environment avoiding contamination, for astronauts training, for refueling and maintenance of deep space vessels. Whatever the exploitation is such large structure would undergo numerous docking\undocking activities with a time dependent matrix of inertia; it should require a large lifetime along with orbital stability would be also needed and, being the structure extended, a strongly coupled attitude\orbital dynamics is expected. Lagrangian points are an evident appealing location for such an infrastructure offering stable trajectories as well as well suited relative positioning with respect to the Sun and the other planets to be considered in the 3 body system. The investigation of the relative dynamics on non-keplerian orbits is the topic of the paper: a case study is presented for the EMPIRE (Earth-Moon multiPurpose orbiting infRastructurE) scenario: EMPIRE is a long-term multipurpose extended structure placed on Halo around the L1 in the Earth-Moon system, many different space complex and articulated missions may benefit of. The rendez-vous and approach phases between EMPIRE and any attachable module are formalized for the CR3BP together with the guidance profile to gain the nominal final state vector. Effects of perturbations on the EMPIRE extended configuration in terms of attitude\CoM coupled effects are also discussed.