A Study of the Duration of the Passage through the Van Allen Belts for a Spacecraft going to the Moon

This paper has the goal of estimating the fuel consumption and the duration of the transit in the Van Allen belts for a flight of a spacecraft going from the Earth to the Moon. This problem is very important because the region interior to the belts have a high density of energetic charged particles that can damage the satellite, so minimizing this transit time helps in protecting the equipments on board. The propulsive force is assumed to have a low magnitude and to be applied in the direction of the motion of the spacecraft to maximize the energy transferred to the space vehicle. Perturbation forces are considered in the dynamical model and they influence in both results, consumption and transit time.