Formation Flying Dynamics in Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem and Applications to Binary Asteroid Systems

The employment of two or more co-operating spacecraft to achieve complex mission objectives is one of the most promising and challenging problems in space mission design. The fulllment of relative position and velocity requirements is then becoming very important and the need of minimizing the control action needed for formation keeping is the goal of many recent studies and analysis. This result can be eectively accomplished by exploiting the dynamical properties of a low-acceleration environment such as the vicinity of libration points associated to the Circular Restricted Three Body Problem (CR3BP). The present work explores the eects of this particular dynamical environment on an uncontrolled equilateral formation of satellites and investigates convenient initial congurations, in terms of orientation and size of the formation, which lead to good performance in terms of formation keeping. The dynamical environment is then explored, when some constraints are imposed on the relative dynamics of two co-operating spacecraft and the regions in the space which satisfy the dynamical constraints are found. Finally, the results and the design tools developed, are applied to investigate possible scenarios for future space missions aimed to the exploration of a Near-Earth binary asteroid system: the gravity eld generated by the asteroid pair is modeled and a particular scenario is simulated.