Modelling of the Moon orbiter for the ESA project ESMO

This paper presents the simulator developed for the European Student Moon Orbiter (ESMO) project, which is planned to be the first European student mission to the Moon. During the ESMO project, student teams, supported by faculty staff, will produce a complete spacecraft from scratch. Its mission will be to fly towards the Moon, enter the Moon's orbit and execute scientific experiments while orbiting around the Moon. A Functional Engineering Simulator (FES) was produced as a part of the ESMO project and will allow the project teams to model the spacecraft's functions and performance at various stages of the mission and simulate the space environment. This paper focuses on the spacecraft's orbit and attitude propagation model. Finally, the overview of the FES simulator is presented along with the preliminary results produced with the simulator.