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In this work, end-to-end low-thrust transfers from a GTO orbit to a low-altitude lunar orbit by exploiting the manifolds of a chosen Earth–Moon L 1 halo orbit has been studied. The practicality of piece-wise, minimum-time transfers that exploit halo orbit manifolds is demonstrated, which offers more flexibility to meet mission objectives. It is known that the structure of the manifolds varies substantially due to the presence of the Sun and its contribution has to be considered to obtain more realistic trajectories. To incorporate Sun's perturbation, we study (1) manifolds' behavior within a Bi-Circular Problem (BCP) dynamics and (2) Sun's impact on the previously converged trajectories obtained using the standard Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem (CR3BP). Comparisons of the resulting trajectories using the CR3BP and BCP are presented. • Analyzed invariant manifolds in the CR3BP and BCP. • Methodology to analyze patch points on manifold for transfer trajectories. • Demonstrated feasibility of low-thrust transfer using invariant manifolds. • Designed Earth GTO to 1000 km circular lunar polar orbit via patching to manifolds. • Framework to merge periodic orbits and manifolds with indirect optimal control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]