English

Extended two-body problem for rotating rigid bodies

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2021-10-22 v1 Computational Physics

Abstract

A new technique that utilizes surface integrals to find the force, torque and potential energy between two non-spherical, rigid bodies is presented. The method is relatively fast, and allows us to solve the full rigid two-body problem for pairs of spheroids and ellipsoids with 12 degrees of freedom. We demonstrate the method with two dimensionless test scenarios, one where tumbling motion develops, and one where the motion of the bodies resemble spinning tops. We also test the method on the asteroid binary (66391) 1999 KW4, where both components are modelled either as spheroids or ellipsoids. The two different shape models have negligible effects on the eccentricity and semi-major axis, but have a larger impact on the angular velocity along the zz-direction. In all cases, energy and total angular momentum is conserved, and the simulation accuracy is kept at the machine accuracy level.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.03274,
  title  = {Extended two-body problem for rotating rigid bodies},
  author = {Alex Ho and Margrethe Wold and John T. Conway and Mohammad Poursina},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.03274},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

24 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy

R2 v1 2026-06-24T03:58:08.881Z