Spacecraft Formation Flying

Chapter 8

Perturbation Mitigation

Publisher Summary

This chapter explores the perturbation mitigation approach and demonstrates how to adjust or constrain some of the initial conditions to reduce the amount of fuel required to counter the undesirable effects resulting from the J2 perturbation. The chapter begins by introducing dynamic constraints for J2 mitigation. The chapter presents the nonlinear theory based on orbital elements. The first-order analysis is extended to the second-order in the Yan–Alfriend theory. A comparison of several linear and nonlinear analytical relative motion propagation theories is presented on the basis of a nonlinearity error index, which is a measure of the relative importance of modeling geometric nonlinearity, eccentricity, ...