Abstract
This chapter considers orbital dynamics about planetary satellites, a topic distinct from orbital dynamics relative to asteroids or comets. We cover this topic in the remaining chapters as it represents another example of a strongly perturbed orbital system for spacecraft. Europa is chosen as the nominal central body for large planetary satellites due to the great interest of sending an orbiter mission to this body to probe its interior ocean, and due to the fact that its orbital dynamics environment is quite interesting and has been considered in a number of papers [167, 188, 186, 127, 126, 128, 146, 148, 147, 88, 89, 87] and theses [187, 125, 123]. At heart, the theory of large planetary orbiters is the study of dynamics in the Hill problem, previously derived in Chapters 2 and 4. This chapter introduces a number of different analyses that can be applied to this system, and provides the tools for scaling these results to planetary satellites in general.
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