On the stability of satellites at unstable libration points of sun-planet-moon systems
Abstract
The five libration points of a sun-planet system are stable or unstable fixed positions at which satellites or asteroids can remain fixed relative to the two orbiting bodies. A moon orbiting around the planet causes a time-dependent perturbation on the system. Here, we address the sense in which invariant structure remains. We employ a transition state theory developed previously for periodically driven systems with a rank-1 saddle in the context of chemical reactions. We find that a satellite can be parked on a so-called time-periodic transition state trajectory -- which is an orbit restricted to the vicinity of the libration point L2 for infinitely long time -- and investigate the stability properties of that orbit.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2109.12612,
title = {On the stability of satellites at unstable libration points of sun-planet-moon systems},
author = {Johannes Reiff and Jonas C. J. Zatsch and Jörg Main and Rigoberto Hernandez},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.12612},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Main article has 15 pages, 6 figures. For convenience to the reader there is a some text overlap between parts of Appendix B of this manuscript and Section C of the Supplemental Material in arXiv:2011.04029