Investigation of vehicle reusability for human exploration of Near-Earth Asteroids using Sun-Earth Libration point orbits

Current plans for human exploration of the solar system envision several missions to Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) as stepping stones towards missions to Mars. This research investigates the feasibility of stationing reusable cargo spacecraft, such as habitats, in halo orbits at Sun-Earth Libration points 1 and 2 (L-1 and L-2) between NEA missions in an effort to reduce mission cost and thus overall campaign cost by lowering the mass required to be launched and the amount of new hardware to be built for each mission. Four example missions to the two currently most promising targets of the known NEA population in the 2025-2030 time frame are chosen. In the mission architecture proposed in this study, the crew vehicle directly commutes between Earth and the asteroid in order to keep mission durations for the crew short. The cargo vehicle departs from a halo orbit, rendezvous with the crew vehicle on the outbound trajectory, and returns to a halo orbit after the mission. Manifold trajectories of halo orbits in the northern and southern halo orbit family at L-1 and L-2 are considered for the transfer of the cargo vehicle to and from the interplanetary trajectory and the total Delta v required for this transfer is minimized. This Delta v is found to range from a few meters per second to hundreds of meters per second, depending on the specific energy and inclination of the interplanetary trajectory. These results show the great potential of the utilization of Sun-Earth Libration point orbits for enabling vehicle reusability, thus lowering the cost of human exploration missions. (C) 2012 IAA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.