On the Arnold diffusion mechanism in Medium Earth Orbit

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Alessi, Elisa Maria, Baldomá, Inmaculada, Giralt, Mar, Guardia, Marcel
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Alessi, Elisa Maria
Baldomá, Inmaculada
Giralt, Mar
Guardia, Marcel
author_facet Alessi, Elisa Maria
Baldomá, Inmaculada
Giralt, Mar
Guardia, Marcel
contents Space debris mitigation guidelines represent the most effective method to preserve the circumterrestrial environment. Among them, end-of-life disposal solutions play a key role. A growing effort is devoted to exploit natural perturbations to lead the satellites towards an atmospheric reentry, reducing the disposal cost, also if departing from high-altitude regions. In the case of the Medium Earth Orbit region, home of the navigation satellites (like Galileo), the main driver is the gravitational perturbation due to the Moon, that can increase the eccentricity in the long term. In this way, the pericenter altitude can get into the atmospheric drag domain and the satellite can eventually reenter. In this work, we show how an Arnold diffusion mechanism can trigger the eccentricity growth. Focusing on the case of Galileo, we consider a hierarchy of Hamiltonian models, assuming that the main perturbations on the motion of the spacecraft are the oblateness of the Earth and the gravitational attraction of the Moon. First, the Moon is assumed to lay on the ecliptic plane and periodic orbits and associated stable and unstable invariant manifolds are computed for various energy levels, in the neighborhood of a given resonance. Along each invariant manifold, the eccentricity increases naturally, achieving its maximum at the first intersection between them. This growth is, however, not sufficient to achieve reentry. By moving to a model where the inclination of the Moon is taken into account, the problem becomes non-autonomous and the satellite is able to move along different energy levels. Under the ansatz of transversality of the manifolds in the autonomous case, checked numerically, Poincaré-Melnikov techniques are applied to show how diffusion can be attained, by constructing a sequence of homoclinic orbits that connect invariant tori at different energy levels.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_01283
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Arnold diffusion mechanism in Medium Earth Orbit
Alessi, Elisa Maria
Baldomá, Inmaculada
Giralt, Mar
Guardia, Marcel
Dynamical Systems
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
37N05, 37J40, 70F07, 70F15
Space debris mitigation guidelines represent the most effective method to preserve the circumterrestrial environment. Among them, end-of-life disposal solutions play a key role. A growing effort is devoted to exploit natural perturbations to lead the satellites towards an atmospheric reentry, reducing the disposal cost, also if departing from high-altitude regions. In the case of the Medium Earth Orbit region, home of the navigation satellites (like Galileo), the main driver is the gravitational perturbation due to the Moon, that can increase the eccentricity in the long term. In this way, the pericenter altitude can get into the atmospheric drag domain and the satellite can eventually reenter. In this work, we show how an Arnold diffusion mechanism can trigger the eccentricity growth. Focusing on the case of Galileo, we consider a hierarchy of Hamiltonian models, assuming that the main perturbations on the motion of the spacecraft are the oblateness of the Earth and the gravitational attraction of the Moon. First, the Moon is assumed to lay on the ecliptic plane and periodic orbits and associated stable and unstable invariant manifolds are computed for various energy levels, in the neighborhood of a given resonance. Along each invariant manifold, the eccentricity increases naturally, achieving its maximum at the first intersection between them. This growth is, however, not sufficient to achieve reentry. By moving to a model where the inclination of the Moon is taken into account, the problem becomes non-autonomous and the satellite is able to move along different energy levels. Under the ansatz of transversality of the manifolds in the autonomous case, checked numerically, Poincaré-Melnikov techniques are applied to show how diffusion can be attained, by constructing a sequence of homoclinic orbits that connect invariant tori at different energy levels.
title On the Arnold diffusion mechanism in Medium Earth Orbit
topic Dynamical Systems
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
37N05, 37J40, 70F07, 70F15
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01283