Ricerc@Sapienza

In this work, periodic attitudes and bifurcations of periodic families are investigated for a rigid spacecraft moving on a stationary orbit around a uniformly rotating asteroid. Under the second degree and order gravity field of an asteroid, the dynamical model of attitude motion is formulated by truncating the integrals of inertia of the spacecraft at the second order. In this dynamical system, the equilibrium attitude has zero Euler angles. The linearised equations of attitude motion are utilised to study the stability of equilibrium attitude.

In this work, equilibrium attitude configurations, attitude stability and periodic attitude families are investigated for rigid spacecrafts moving on stationary orbits around asteroid 216 Kleopatra. The polyhedral approach is adopted to formulate the equations of rotational motion. In this dynamical model, six equilibrium attitude configurations with non-zero Euler angles are identified for a spacecraft moving on each stationary orbit. Then the linearized equations of attitude motion at equilibrium attitudes are derived.