Evaluation of the Modified Picard-Chebyshev Method for High-Precision Orbit Propagation

Abstract

AbstractThe modified Picard-Chebyshev method, due to its formulation, has the potential for computationally efficient orbit propagation in a parallel computing environment. However, it has not found extensive use in commercial software applications, primarily due to its instability over long orbit propagation times. In this paper, the method was evaluated based on the propagation of several test orbits with a high-precision force model available through NASA’s Java Astrodynamics toolkit. The goal was to analyze the stability properties of the method, with emphasis on its dependence on the initial guess and the order of the approximating Chebyshev polynomial. Simulation results indicated a dependence of the method on the precision of the computation as well. Additionally, the performance of the method when implemented in parallel was evaluated by propagating the orbits on a multicore processing unit and comparing run times to well-known sequential numerical propagators. The preliminary results show that th...