ATTITUDE DYNAMICS OF A SATELLITE ON A CIRCULAR AND ELLIPTIC LOW EARTH ORBIT

Abstract

The paper deals with the effect of the length on the type and stability of the inplane attitude motion of a dumbbell satellite moving on circular and elliptic equatorial Low Earth Orbits (LEO) by which the air drag also has a weak influence. For a circular LEO, a saddle-node bifurcation is found at some critical value of the length. This investigation can be performed analytically using imperfect bifurcation theory. When the orbit is elliptic using the results from the circular case, numerical simulation is used to approach the phase trajectories for sub- and supercritical values of the length. Depending on the order of the orbit eccentricity, three kinds of behaviour seem to be possible.