Fireworks Algorithm Applied to Trajectory Design for Earth to Lunar Halo Orbits

A simple and efficient method using the fireworks algorithm (FWA) is presented for pruning the search space of an impulsive maneuver transfer from a user-defined low Earth orbit (LEO) to a desired lunar halo orbit around Earth-moon Lagrange point 2. The dynamical framework adopted is the circular restricted three-body problem. The FWA method is used to optimize both the two-burn direct impulsive transfer and the impulsive transfer that uses stable manifolds. Sample LEO to lunar halo trajectories, along with their required Delta V costs and times of flight (TOFs), are provided and compared to known numerical techniques. The results obtained are close in both Delta V and TOFs to what the existing literature reports, which demonstrates the validity of the proposed method.