EQUULEUS Trajectory Control Demonstration within Sun-Earth-Moon Region

EQUULEUS demonstrates orbital control technologies to fly to the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points. The Earth-Moon Lagrangian points are the positions where each gravity and centrifugal force balance each other. Especially, the Earth-Moon L2 point (EML2) gets attention as a construction place candidate of a deep spaceport for the future deep space exploration. One of the reason is that the orbital motion around EML2 is very sensitive. Therefore, the spacecraft departing from EML2 can transfer to various orbits, such as Earth orbits, Moon orbits, and interplanetary orbits, with a tiny amount of orbital control. On the other hand, the spacecraft can arrive at EML2 with a little amount of orbital control, too. Consequently, in spite that the 6U CubeSat is very small, EQUULEUS can fly toward EML2 using the lunar flybys and the solar gravity (solar tidal force).