FLYBY DESIGN USING HETEROCLINIC AND HOMOCLINIC CONNECTIONS OF UNSTABLE RESONANT ORBITS

Tour designs using flybys have traditionally been studied using two-body patched conic methods. Previous work has shown that trajectories designed using these techniques and with optimization methods follow the invariant manifolds of unstable resonant orbits as they transition between resonances. This work is continued here by computing heteroclinic and homoclinic trajectories associated with these unstable resonant orbits. These trajectories are used with multiple resonances to design flybys that transition between these resonances in the circular restricted three-body problem without the need for two-body approximations.