A Study of Short-term Captures Formation in the Earth-Moon System

This paper investigates the origins of a group of near-Earth asteroids known as both temporarily captured orbiters and Short-Term Captures (STCs), which are valuable candidates for future space exploration (and utilization) missions. A database of over 20000 numerically obtained synthetic asteroids that experience temporary captures in the Earth-Moon system are compared against the theoretically derived definition of the STC. It is shown that i) contrary to the previous deliberations, STCs do not necessarily follow the invariant manifolds from periodic planar Lyapunov orbits into the Earth-Moon system; and ii) in fact, less than 0.5% of STC trajectories are planar. Consequently, a planar model is not sufficient for describing the formation of STCs.