| Abstract: |
| Motivated by the need of preserving the operational orbital regions around the Earth, natural perturbations can be exploited to lead satellites towards atmospheric reentry at the end of life. In the case of the Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) region the main driver is the third-body perturbation.
In this work, we show how an Arnold diffusion mechanism can trigger the eccentricity growth in MEO, so that the pericenter altitude drops into the atmospheric drag domain. Focusing on the case of Galileo, we consider a hierarchy of Hamiltonian models, assuming that the main perturbations are the oblateness of the Earth and the gravitational attraction of the Moon.
First, the Moon is assumed to lay on the ecliptic plane and periodic orbits and associated stable and unstable invariant manifolds are computed for various energy levels, in the neighborhood of a given resonance. Along each invariant manifold, the eccentricity increases naturally, achieving its maximum at the first intersection between them. This growth is, however, not sufficient to achieve reentry. By moving to a more realistic model, where the inclination of the Moon is taken into account, the problem becomes non-autonomous and the satellite is able to move along different energy levels. |
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