Related papers: The Delicate Dance of Orbital Rendezvous

In this work, we performed a dynamical analysis of a spacecraft around a nearly equal-mass binary near-Earth asteroid with application to the asteroid 2017 YE5, which is also a possible dormant Jupiter-family comet. Thus, we investigated…

The relationship between two dynamical systems, one of which is obtained from the other by forming the quotient by an action of an involution commuting with the dynamics, is studied. The constraints and the possible extent of freedom in the…

The so-called flyby anomaly has encouraged several authors to analyze in detail the minor perturbative contributions to the trajectory of spacecraft performing a flyby manoeuvre. This anomaly consist of an unexplained increase or decrease…

We study orbital inclination changes associated with the precession of a disc-planet system that occurs through gravitational interaction with a binary companion on an inclined orbit. We investigate whether this scenario can account for…

Tsiganis et al. (2005) have proposed that the current orbital architecture of the outer solar system could have been established if it was initially compact and Jupiter and Saturn crossed the 2:1 orbital resonance by divergent migration.…

In some planetary systems, the orbital periods of two of its members present a commensurability, usually known by mean-motion resonance. These resonances greatly enhance the mutual gravitational influence of the planets. As a consequence,…

Spacecraft rendezvous enables on-orbit servicing, debris removal, and crewed docking, forming the foundation for a scalable space economy. Designing such missions requires rapid exploration of the tradespace between control cost and flight…

This work focuses on the identification of reliable and repeatable spatial (three-dimensional) trajectories that link the Earth and the Moon. For this purpose, this paper aims to extend the 2:1 resonant prograde family and 2:1 resonant…

This paper presents a computationally efficient optimization algorithm for solving nonconvex optimal control problems that involve discrete logic constraints. Traditional solution methods for these constraints require binary variables and…

Much effort has been invested in recent years, both observationally and theoretically, to understand the interacting processes taking place in planetary systems consisting of a hot Jupiter orbiting its star within 10 stellar radii. Several…

We show that interaction with a gas disk may produce young planetary systems with closely-spaced orbits, stabilized by mean-motion resonances between neighbors. On longer timescales, after the gas is gone, interaction with a remnant…

We investigate the convergence towards periodic orbits in discrete dynamical systems. We examine the probability that a randomly chosen point converges to a particular neighborhood of a periodic orbit in a fixed number of iterations, and we…

Graze-and-merge collisions (GMCs) are common multi-step mergers occurring in low-velocity off-axis impacts between similar sized planetary bodies. The first impact happens at somewhat faster than the mutual escape velocity; for typical…

We construct a highly-symmetric periodic orbit of six bodies in three dimensions. In this orbit, binary collisions occur at the origin in a regular periodic fashion, rotating between pairs of bodies located on the coordinate axes.…

When the Moon was formed it was much closer to the Earth than it is today. It just needed about 20 days then to go around the Earth. Now it takes the Moon 29.5 days to make one revolution. In order to follow the conservation of angular…

The nearby space surrounding the Earth is densely populated by artificial satellites and instruments, whose orbits are distributed within the Low-Earth-Orbit region (LEO), ranging between 90 and 2 000 $km$ of altitude. As a consequence of…

The dynamics and control of a satellite in proximity to the asteroid Apophis across its Earth close approach in 2029 is evaluated and investigated. First, the feasibility of carrying out close proximity operations about Apophis when in its…

This article is inspired by the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn on December 21st, 2020. We will address the following questions from a mathematical standpoint. What is a conjunction? How often do we have a conjunction of two…

The final sizes, composition, and angular momenta of solid planetary bodies depend on the outcomes of collisions between planetary embryos. The most common numerical method for simulating embryo collisions is to combine a gravity solver…

Over 34,000 objects bigger than 10 cm in length are known to orbit Earth. Among them, only a small percentage are active satellites, while the rest of the population is made of dead satellites, rocket bodies, and debris that pose a…