Most cislunar satellite orbits from 1 million simulations fail to stay stable over years

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists used two supercomputers to simulate about 1 million trajectories of cislunar satellites between Earth and the Moon. While roughly 54% remained stable for at least a year, only about 9.7% stayed stable over a six-year span — amounting to around 97,000 stable orbits. The results, published in 2025 in Research Notes of the AAS and shared on arXiv, underscore the complexity of predicting cislunar dynamics due to the Moon’s and Earth’s gravitational influences and solar effects, but the data are open for future research on space infrastructure and orbit selection.,