Stability of Apollo 13 lunar orbit

[MikeB]

Over on Gizmodo, there is a list of the things that went wrong leading up to the Apollo 13 "problem":
http://io9.com/the-checklist-of-what-had-to-go-wrong-for-apollo-13-to-1697567898

In the discussion someone raised the question: "if the explosion had occurred after the lunar explorers had returned to the CM and after the LM had been jettisoned, and for some reason they hadn't been able to leave lunar orbit...would Apollo 13's orbit have been stable enough that it would still be in orbit about the moon to this day?"

I haven't yet tried to apply Orbiter to this question, but thought I'd ask the community: Is Orbiter's model of lunar gravity accurate enough to answer this? If so, how long would the CSM remain in orbit?

 

[boogabooga]

No.

Low lunar orbits decay over time due to "lumpy" gravity. This is not modeled in Orbiter 2010. Actually, IIRC, Orbiter does not model lunar gravity perturbations at all.

The time to decay varies greatly.

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit"]Lunar orbit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

 

[Ravenous]

Another thing to consider; a few of the LM ascent stages were actually left in lunar orbit. (Apollo 11 for example was deliberately left running to check reliability of its systems.)

All of these eventually decayed and crashed on the surface, somewhere, probably within months. So the orbits definitely weren't stable.

 

[Dantassii]

With a specially designed orbit, the sub-satelite released by Apollo 15 stayed in orbit for a year. The identical twin released by Apollo 16 was not released in the proper orbit and lasted about a month.

Dantassii
HUMONGOUS IMS shipbuilder