East-west stationkeeping requirements of nearly synchronous satellites due to Earth's triaxiality and luni-solar effects

Abstract

A closed form solution, for longitude and semimajor axis deviations in the neighborhood of a prespecified station, is obtained for nearly synchronous satellites. The model use includes the important terms in Earth's zonal and tesseral harmonics as well as the luni-solar perturbations. The initial semimajor axis for two-maneuver east-west stationkeeping is then deduced. Due to the luni-solar effects, it is found that the initial semimajor axis deviation from synchronous orbit value is highly dependent on the initial position of the satellite relative to the Moon and the Sun. Verifications of the results by means of numerical integrations are also included.