"Symplectic orbit propagation based on Deprit’s radial intermediary" by Leonel Palacios and Pini Gurfil

Article Title

Symplectic orbit propagation based on Deprit’s radial intermediary

Authors

Leonel Palacios, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3200003, Israel
Pini Gurfil, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3200003, Israel

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.