Database of Planar and Three-Dimensional Periodic Orbits and Families Near the Moon

The lunarPOdatabase.zip is the digital database accompanying the paper:

C. Franz and R. P. Russell, “Database of planar and three-dimensional periodic orbits and families near the Moon,” The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, DOI 10.1007/s40295-022-00361-9 (accepted Nov. 2022).

Please see the paper for details, and cite the paper as appropriate. The database is accessible and permanently archived with the following DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6411980.  See accompanying license.txt and gpl-3.0.txt for license information, applying to all files included in the .zip distribution.

The database contains over 13 million planar and three-dimensional solutions in the Earth-Moon circular restricted three body problem, grouped into 34,000 family and sub-family clusters. The database exists as human readable text files with periodic orbits organized by clusters and other dynamical characteristics.  The database contains the clustered data, a README file describing the output format, an interactive GUI, and a simple MATLAB script as a basic interface with the database. The data are split into five files, one for each of the planar prograde, planar retrograde, axial prograde, axial retrograde, and x-z cases. The results (i.e. initial conditions and relevant dynamical parameters of each converged periodic orbit) are contained in a human-readable text file where each row is a new solution. The data are sorted by cluster and ordered inside the cluster to form a smooth curve. Summary files are included for both the grid search and the clustering for each run. The input parameters to the grid search software are also included with each case for reproducibility. File sizes range from approximately 1.1GB to 2.6GB, with a total uncompressed file size of 5.4GB and a total compressed file size of 1.2GB.

It is emphasized that the GUI and other MATLAB interface files are only a preliminary capability to ease interaction with the database.  They may not be stable under future releases of MATLAB. On the initial use of the GUI, we recommend to restrict the data to a single value of N (say N=1 or N=16), otherwise the number of solutions may overwhelm the system memory.  If a user has difficulties using the GUI, the user is encouraged to use the MATLAB code interfaces or interface with the text files directly. The text files containing the database are the primary product provided here, with the GUI and test scripts provided as a courtesy to help ease the database's use.

Please send questions to [e-mail] and/or [e-mail].