Home > ASTRODYNAMICS > Vol. 2 (2018) > Iss. 4

Article Title
Symplectic orbit propagation based on Deprit’s radial intermediary
Keywords
symplectic integration, spacecraft orbit propagation, Deprit’s radial intermediary, symplecticity, Hamiltonian dynamics
Abstract
The constantly challenging requirements for orbit prediction have opened the need for betteronboard propagation tools. Runge–Kutta (RK) integrators have been widely used for thispurpose; however RK integrators are not symplectic, which means that RK integrators maylead to incorrect global behavior and degraded accuracy. Emanating from Deprit’s radialintermediary, obtained by the elimination of the parallax transformation, we present thedevelopment of symplectic integrators of different orders for spacecraft orbit propagation.Through a set of numerical simulations, it is shown that these integrators are more accurateand substantially faster than Runge–Kutta-based methods. Moreover, it is also shown thatthe proposed integrators are more accurate than analytic propagation algorithms basedon Deprit’s radial intermediary solution, and even other previously-developed symplecticintegrators.
Publisher
Tsinghua University Press
Recommended Citation
Leonel Palacios,Pini Gurfil,Symplectic orbit propagation based on Deprit’s radial intermediary.Astrodyn.2018, 2(4): 375–386.