Nonsingular recursion formulas for third-body perturbations in mean vectorial elements

¹ Scientific Computing Group, University of La Rioja, Calle Madre de Dios 53, 26006 Logroño, Spain
e-mail: martin.lara@unirioja.es
² Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, The University of Arizona, 1130 N. Mountain Ave., PO Box 210119, Tucson, AZ, USA
e-mail: ajrosengren@email.arizona.edu
³ Department of Aerospace Engineering, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, PO Box 127788, Abu Dhabi, UAE
e-mail: elena.fantino@ku.ac.ae

Received: 13 November 2019
Accepted: 3 January 2020

Abstract

The description of the long-term dynamics of highly elliptic orbits under third-body perturbations may require an expansion of the disturbing function in series of the semi-major axes ratio up to higher orders. To avoid dealing with long series in trigonometric functions, we refer the motion to the apsidal frame and efficiently remove the short-period effects of this expansion in vectorial form up to an arbitrary order. We then provide the variation equations of the two fundamental vectors of the Keplerian motion by analogous vectorial recurrences, which are free from singularities and take a compact form useful for the numerical propagation of the flow in mean elements.