冰卫星冻结轨道长期保持的脉冲控制策略

The frozen orbits around icy moons of the giant planets suffer from long-term instability caused by perturbations. An impulsive strategy is proposed in this work for the long-term station keeping of these high-inclination frozen orbits. Considering the nonsphericity of the icy moon and the third-body perturbation from the planet, the long-term orbital dynamics around the icy moon has been established through the double-averaging technique. Based on this framework, the long-term station-keeping strategy is developed by leveraging manifolds of unstable frozen orbits in the averaged system. First, desired mean elements located on the stable manifold of the frozen orbit are selected. Then, the desired mean elements are converted to the osculating elements through a numerical scheme incorporating the goldensection search and differential correction. Finally, a nonlinear programming problem for impulsive maneuvers is constructed and solved to achieve the long-term station keeping by repeated transfers to stable manifolds. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed strategy can effectively suppress the long-term growth of the eccentricity caused by perturbations and extend the orbital lifetime.