Identifying heteroclinic connections using artificial neural networks

Abstract This paper demonstrates the usage of artificial neural networks (ANN) to identify heteroclinic connections in astrodynamical systems. The ANN architecture is applied to find heteroclinic connections, or lack thereof, in the Earth-Moon circular restricted three body problem from L 1 to L 2 Lyapunov orbits for Jacobi values between 3.07 and 3.17. The predicted heteroclinic connections are within 0.1–1% of the arclength along the periodic orbit from their true locations.