Nechvile-Transformed Spacecraft Dynamics and Propellant Computation in the 3-Body Problem
Abstract
The uncontrolled equations of motion in the Nechvile frame for the restricted three-body problem have been well-known since at least the 1960s. It would seem that adding an external force to these equations is quite trivial: simply add an external force per mass term to the acceleration equations. Here we show that the last statement is not true. In fact, we show that the additive generic external force must be multiplied by the inverse of (1 + e cosθ)3 where e is the relative eccentricity of the primaries and θ is the true anomaly of the rotating frame located at the barycenter. Furthermore, when this result is combined with the mass flow rate equation, it generates several surprising results due to the mismatch between the resulting quadratic term and the cubic term in the equations of motion. This leads to a corresponding modification of the rocket equation itself. A Birkhoff-theoretic solution to an illustrative cislunar space mission problem shows propellent savings of 80% with the use of the correct cost functional. The popular quadratic cost utilizes more than 2X the minimum propellant consumption.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{dixon2026nechviletransformed,
title = {{Nechvile-Transformed Spacecraft Dynamics and Propellant Computation in the 3-Body Problem}},
author = {Michael J. Dixon and Isaac M. Ross},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.29271},
eprint = {2608.29271},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29271},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Nechvile-Transformed Spacecraft Dynamics and Propellant Computation in the 3-Body Problem
AU - Michael J. Dixon
AU - Isaac M. Ross
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/29
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.29271
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29271
AB - The uncontrolled equations of motion in the Nechvile frame for the restricted three-body problem have been well-known since at least the 1960s. It would seem that adding an external force to these equations is quite trivial: simply add an external force per mass term to the acceleration equations. Here we show that the last statement is not true. In fact, we show that the additive generic external force must be multiplied by the inverse of (1 + e cosθ)^3 where e is the relative eccentricity of the primaries and θ is the true anomaly of the rotating frame located at the barycenter. Furthermore, when this result is combined with the mass flow rate equation, it generates several surprising results due to the mismatch between the resulting quadratic term and the cubic term in the equations of motion. This leads to a corresponding modification of the rocket equation itself. A Birkhoff-theoretic solution to an illustrative cislunar space mission problem shows propellent savings of 80% with the use of the correct cost functional. The popular quadratic cost utilizes more than 2X the minimum propellant consumption.
ER -