LUNAR NEAR RECTILINEAR ORBITS AND CIS-LUNAR TRANSFER TRAJECTORIES IN SUPPORT OF THE DEEP SPACE PROVING GROUND

The NASA Evolvable Mars Campaign (EMC) contains the Deep Space Proving Ground (DSPG) in the near-Lunar vicinity as one of the major increments along the path to a sustainable human spaceflight architecture. The DSPG development path includes several key hardware architectural elements including the Space Launch System (SLS), the Orion crew vehicle, and an extended stay capability provided by an Exploration Augmentation Module (EAM). Recent NASA studies have indicated that a class of cislunar Halo orbits known as Near Rectilinear Orbits or NROs, could be a useful staging location for human-tended cislunar operations in the DSPG away from the Lunar Distant Retrograde Orbit (LDRO). In this paper, we describe a method for the simple creation and analysis of these orbits and provide and describe their fundamental characteristics.