Formation reconfiguration in restricted three body problem

Reconfiguration of formation flying around a halo orbit of the Sun-Earth restricted three body system is investigated with impulse maneuvers. For a short time reconfiguration, the two-impulse maneuver is investigated with both analytical and numerical methods and the Beginning-Ending (BE) method is proven to be an energy-optimal one of all two-impulse (TI) reconfigurations, and the energy consumption of BE is independent of the position of the chief spacecraft, and decreases with the reconfiguration time. Then, genetic algorithm is adopted to optimize the energy consumption. The results show that the optimal energy increases with radius difference between the initial and final orbits, and decreases with the reconfiguration time.