Abstract
A planetary satellite of interest at the present moment for the scientific community is Europa, one of the four largest moons of Jupiter. There are some missions planned to visit Europa in the next years, for example, Jupiter Europa Orbiter (JEO, NASA) and Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE, ESA). In this paper, we search for orbits around Europa with long lifetimes. Here, we develop the disturbing potential in closed form up to the second order to analyze the effects caused on the orbital elements of an artificial satellite around Europa. The equations of motion are developed in closed form to avoid expansions in power series of the eccentricity and inclination. We found polar orbits with long lifetimes. This type of orbits reduces considerably the maintenance cost of the orbit. We show a formula to calculate the critical inclination of orbits around Europa taking into account the disturbing potential due to the nonspherical shape of the central body and the perturbation of the third body.
Highlights
A planetary satellite of interest at the present moment for the scientific community is Europa, one of the four largest moons of Jupiter
The disturbing potential of the orbital motion of artificial satellites orbiting Europa taking into account the gravitational attraction of a third body (R2) and the nonuniform distribution of mass (J2, J3) of the planetary satellite can be written in the form: R = R2 + RJ2 + RJ3
An analytical theory has been developed where the disturbing potential was obtained in closed form to avoid expansions in power series of the eccentricity and inclination
Summary
A planetary satellite of interest at the present moment for the scientific community is Europa, one of the four largest moons of Jupiter. The search for frozen orbits (orbits that keep the periapsis and the eccentricity almost constant) for planetary satellites is the subject of numerous papers, for instance, [6,7,8]. We develop the disturbing potential in closed form up to the second order to analyze the effects caused on the orbital elements of the artificial satellite. In order to develop the long-period disturbing potential, the averaged method is applied. The standard definition for average of periodic functions is applied with respect to eccentric anomaly (E) and true anomaly (f), using known equations from the celestial mechanics [14]. We analyze the disturbing potential effects on some orbital elements, such as eccentricity, inclination, argument of the periapsis, and longitude of the ascending node
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