Maintenance of Libration Point Orbit in Elliptic Sun-Mercury Model.

The maintenance of the nominal multirevolution elliptic halo orbit, whose special features can benefit mercurial explorations, is first investigated through Monte–Carlo simulations in the elliptic Sun–Mercury model, and then validated in the high-fidelity ephemeris model. The receding horizon control strategy solved by the indirect Radau pseudospectral method demonstrates that the orbit can be maintained robustly with respect to very large initial deviations. Moreover, the result proves that the elliptic Sun–Mercury model is an accurate approximation.