The Week

The Gateway “will not circle the moon the way a satellite circles Earth” and will instead “travel in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, or NRHO, an elongated path shaped by the combined gravity of Earth and the moon rather than by the moon alone,” said Earth.com. The NRHO “passes within 1,000 miles of the moon’s north pole” and then rounds its turn “about 40,000 miles past the lunar south pole,” said Popular Science. The Gateway NRHO “provides an uninterrupted line of sight for communications to Earth and requires little propellant to maintain,” Diane Davis, an associate professor of space engineering at the Texas A&M University College of Engineering and an author of the study, said in the release.