Lunar swingby trajectories and their applications

In this paper, all the possible spacecraft trajectories generated by the lunar swingby process are classified, and the features of the classified trajectories are discussed with application to some hypothetical missions. The possibility of multiple lunar swingbys stemming from the fundamental swingby trajectories is also investigated. The applications studied are the periodic-orbit problem, the orbital-transfer problem, and the escape problem. The calculations are carried out by the patched-conics method. The accuracy of this analytical model is confirmed by comparing the results with those of the Runge-Kutta method.