A FAST PROPAGATOR TO MODEL ORBITAL DEBRIS ENVIRONMENT EVOLUTION IN THE GEOSYNCHRONOUS REGION
- Paper ID
IAF-95-IAA-6.4.05
- author
- company
Lockheed Martin Engineering & Sciences Co.
- country
U.S.A.
- year
1995
- abstract
This paper describes the effects of perturbations on the orbital evolution of objects in the geostationary region relevant to debris modeling. An analytic orbital propagator will be presented, which is fast enough to be useful for debris modeling and accurate enough to model all important effects caused by perturbations which affect the GEO synchronous region. The Geostationary ring is also affected by highly eccentric objects in GEO Transfer Orbits. This fact will be considered in the propagator. The perturbations included in this propagator are the Lunar and Solar gravitational perturbations, the largest terms in the Earth’s gravity harmonics, zonal J2 and tesseral J22. To test the accuracy and speed of the analytic propagator two high fidelity numerical integrators were implemented for verification. Rigorous orbit test cases were chosen for validation. The results of these test cases are presented