Lifetime Maps for Low Lunar Orbits

In the current effort of a renewed lunar exploration age, it is mandatory to characterize the circumlunar space in terms of stable and unstable regions. This is important for the operational phase of the missions (e.g., for station-keeping procedures), for the end-of-life phase, and also in case of failures. In this work, we propagate a grid of initial conditions in semi-major axis, eccentricity and inclination, under the effect of the lunar gravitational potential up to degree and order 50 and the Earth and Sun gravitational accelerations, in order to identify the regions in Low Lunar Orbits (LLOs) that can be considered stable in the long term. The role of the argument of pericenter and longitude of the ascending node is evaluated for specific cases. Possible applications will be shown.