Orbital Design and Control for Jupiter-Observation Spacecraft

This paper investigates the evolution of orbits around Jupiter and designs a sun-synchronous repeating ground track orbit. In the dynamical models, the leading terms of the Jupiter’s oblateness are <i>J</i><sub>2</sub> and <i>J</i><sub>4</sub> terms. A...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chunsheng Jiang, Yongjie Liu, Yu Jiang, Hengnian Li
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-10-01
Series:Aerospace
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4310/8/10/282
Description
Summary:This paper investigates the evolution of orbits around Jupiter and designs a sun-synchronous repeating ground track orbit. In the dynamical models, the leading terms of the Jupiter’s oblateness are <i>J</i><sub>2</sub> and <i>J</i><sub>4</sub> terms. A reasonable range of ground track repetition parameter <i>Q</i> is given and the best observation orbit elements are selected. Meanwhile, the disturbing function acting on the navigation spacecraft is the atmospheric drag and the third body. The law of altitude decay of the spacecraft’s semimajor orbit axis caused by the atmospheric drag is studied, and the inclination perturbation caused by the sun’s gravity is analyzed. This paper designs a semimajor axis compensation strategy to maintain the orbit’s repeatability and proposes an initial inclination prebiased strategy to limit the local time at the descending node in a permitted range. In particular, these two methods are combined in the context of sun-synchronous repeating ground track orbit for better observation of the surface of Jupiter.
ISSN:2226-4310