Artemis: From Gateway to Low Lunar Orbit

One concept Gateway may be in a polar orbit with an apolune of 70,000 km and perilune of 3,000 km. One concept is for the lander and Orion to meet at Gateway. Our alternative is for Artemis to stay in a low lunar orbit and be met there by Orion, the cargo transfer vehicle and the tanker. There are many orbit maneuver sequences that will get us from Gateway to our 15 km altitude orbit. A simple one is shown below. We first lower apogee to 3,000 km we then do a Hohmann transfer from the 3,000 km orbit to the 1753 km orbit (that is 15 km altitude). The maneuver to lower apogee is shown below.

The delta-v for the first maneuver is 0.49 km/s and for the Hohmann transfer is 0.39 km/s.

While in low lunar orbit in between landings the lunar lander will do high resolution photo surveys of the surface. These will be used to train the neural network for landing navigation.

This entry was posted in General and tagged , , , , , by Michael Paluszek. Bookmark the permalink.

About Michael Paluszek

Michael Paluszek is President of Princeton Satellite Systems. He graduated from MIT with a degree in electrical engineering in 1976 and followed that with an Engineer's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 1979. He worked at MIT for a year as a research engineer then worked at Draper Laboratory for 6 years on GN&C for human space missions. He worked at GE Astro Space from 1986 to 1992 on a variety of satellite projects including GPS IIR, Inmarsat 3 and Mars Observer. In 1992 he founded Princeton Satellite Systems.

One thought on “Artemis: From Gateway to Low Lunar Orbit

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.