Orbital motions of a solar sail around the L2 earth-moon libration point

Artificial Lagrange points and periodic orbits around them in the restricted three-body problem have attracted a great deal of attention. Solar sails provide new families of libration points inside regions connected to the classical libration points. Similar to traditional halo orbits centered on the classical libration points, new orbits associated with artificial libration points are widely investigated. The Earth moon libration points have been a topic of great interest in recent years. The orbits around the collinear points are attractive because their unique positions are advantageous for several important applications in space mission design. The out-of-plane distance should be large enough to guarantee that both the lunar far-side and the equatorial regions of the Earth would be visible. Numerical analysis of stability and controllability of the orbits shows that the orbits are unstable but completely controllable with both the reflectivity rate and the sail attitude.