| NASA Technical Paper 3394 Lifetimes of Lunar Satellite Orbits (2009) | |||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||
| Lifetimes of low-altitude lunar orbits are studied in this report to identify feasible parking orbits for fllture lunar missions. The hmar missions currently under stud,,', unlike tile Apollo missions, involve long stay times. To determine orbital lifetimes of hmar parking orbits, a model to describe the nonspherical mass distribution of tile Moon must be adopted. A short discussion of previous attempts to describe the Moon's gravitational field is included, and emphasis is placed on spherical harmonic-gravity models. A subset of the fifth-order and fifth-degree hmar gravity model was adopted in this investigation to generate orbital li%time predictions. This simplified inodel consists of the five gravitational coefficients J2, J3,,15, C22, and Cal. The primary perturlmtion on a low-altitude | |||||||||||||
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