Research on Integrated Mission Planning and Design Method for China’s Manned Lunar Exploration

Aiming at the requirements of top-level mission planning for manned lunar exploration, an integrated mission planning and design method is proposed for China’s manned lunar exploration. By decomposing the whole flight profile, an integrated method based on the circumlunar perturbation is proposed. Then, the three key constraints of sunlight condition, lunar orbit and return landing sites are identified and analyzed. According to the analysis results and the different time scale constraints, the mission monthly window, daily window and hourly window are gradually selected to meet the engineering requirements. In the end, the method has been verified by the co-simulation of manned lunar exploration on the integration platform. It has been proved that the proposed method can solve the comprehensive window design problem for standard and delayed mission, and also provides an effective pathway for rapid planning in a large time scale. This is an English translated version of “Research on Integrated Mission Planning and Design Method for China’s Manned Lunar Exploration” originally published in Journal of Astronautics.