Autonomous perturbations of LISA orbits

TL;DR

This paper analyzes autonomous perturbations on LISA orbits, focusing on the effects of stationary fields like Earth's tidal influence, and explores their implications for orbit injection and potential detection of dark matter or dust.

Contribution

It advances the understanding of autonomous perturbations on LISA orbits by analyzing stationary fields and their impact on orbit stability and measurement interpretation.

Findings

Stationary tidal fields significantly affect LISA orbit structure.

Perturbations from interplanetary dust and dark matter can be modeled with secular solutions.

Implications for orbit injection and measurement accuracy are discussed.

Abstract

We investigate autonomous perturbations on the orbits of LISA, namely the effects produced by fields that can be expressed only in terms of the position, but not of time in the Hill frame. This first step in the study of the LISA orbits has been the subject of recent papers which implement analytical techniques based on a "post-epicyclic" approximation in the Hill frame to find optimal unperturbed orbits. The natural step forward is to analyze the perturbations to purely Keplerian orbits. In the present work a particular emphasis is put on the tidal field of the Earth assumed to be stationary in the Hill frame. An accurate interpretation of the global structure of the perturbed solution sheds light on possible implications on injection in orbit when the time base-line of the mission is longer than that assumed in previous papers. Other relevant classes of autonomous perturbations are those given by the corrections to the Solar field responsible for a slow precession and a global stationary field, associated to sources like the interplanetary dust or a local dark matter component. The inclusion of simple linear contributions in the expansion of these fields produces secular solutions that can be compared with the measurements and possibly used to evaluate some morphological property of the perturbing components.