Design of low-energy capture trajectories in the elliptic restricted four-body problem
The fast development of microsatellites and their use for deep space exploration pushed the interest toward the design of low-energy trajectories. These trajectories take advantage of the mutual action of multiple celestial bodies on the spacecraft, allowing missions with consistent savings of propellant mass, with respect to traditional ones. Because of the inherent high complexity of chaotic dynamics of n-body environments, the design is typically obtained from the combination of some circular restricted 3-body problems (CR3BP).