Energy Research of Moon-to-earth Transfer Architecture Based on Lunar Space Elevator and Three-impulse Transfer

摘要

Lunar space elevator has been imaged to transport payload to orbit from lunar surface. This paper proposes a new moon-to-earth transfer architecture based on lunar space elevator and three-impulse transfer. This architecture utilizes lunar space elevator to transfer spacecraft to a launch altitude h, and then spacecraft produces three delta-vs to transfer to earth. The transfer orbit makes up of three parts: selenocentric elliptical orbit, selenocentric hyperbolic orbit and geocentric elliptical orbit. The energy consumption of transfer architecture is mainly considered in this paper. Optimal energy transfer orbits for different combination of V_e and n are obtained through the optimization of the launch altitude h and three delta-vs, where the V_e is effective exhaust velocity, n is climber-to-spacecraft mass ratio. The optimization results show that compared to the traditional rocket-powered transfer architecture, new architecture could save energy up to 24.2%. We also find that the V_e and n have a significant effect on the optimization results, and the reason is analyzed in the paper.