Weak stability boundary trajectories for the deployment of lunar spacecraft constellations

Suitable lunar constellation coverage can be obtained by separating the satellites in inclinations and node angles. It is shown in the paper that a relevant saving of velocity variation ΔV can be achieved using weak stability boundary trajectories. The weakly stable dynamics of such transfers allows the separation of the satellites from the nominal orbit to the required orbit planes with a small amount of ΔV. This paper also shows that only one different set of orbital parameters at Moon can be reached with the same ΔV manoeuvre starting from a nominal trajectory and ending at a fixed periselenium altitude. In fact, such a feature is proved to be common to other simpler dynamical systems, such as the two- and three-body problems.