Diffusive chaos in navigation satellites orbits

TL;DR

This paper investigates the chaotic behavior of navigation satellite orbits caused by third-body gravitational resonances, revealing a diffusive transport mechanism that impacts orbital stability and collision risk.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the chaotic orbital transport is diffusive and provides diffusion maps for understanding the global dynamical structure of satellite orbits.

Findings

Chaotic motions are driven by overlapping resonances from the Moon and Sun.

Orbital eccentricity can increase significantly due to chaotic diffusion.

Diffusion maps help visualize the dynamical landscape of satellite orbits.

Abstract

The navigation satellite constellations in medium-Earth orbit exist in a background of third-body secular resonances stemming from the perturbing gravitational effects of the Moon and the Sun. The resulting chaotic motions, emanating from the overlapping of neighboring resonant harmonics, induce especially strong perturbations on the orbital eccentricity, which can be transported to large values, thereby increasing the collision risk to the constellations and possibly leading to a proliferation of space debris. We show here that this transport is of a diffusive nature and we present representative diffusion maps that are useful in obtaining a global comprehension of the dynamical structure of the navigation satellite orbits.