Impact of orbital orientations and radii on TianQin constellation stability

TL;DR

This paper investigates how orbital orientation and radius affect the stability of the TianQin gravitational-wave observatory's constellation, proposing an optimization method to enhance stability for future orbit design.

Contribution

It introduces an efficient optimization approach and analyzes the impact of orbital parameters on constellation stability, aiding in refined orbit planning.

Findings

Optimal orbital ranges for stability identified

Impact of orbital orientation and radius quantified

Guidelines for future orbit design provided

Abstract

TianQin is a proposed space-based gravitational-wave observatory mission to be deployed in high circular Earth orbits. The equilateral-triangle constellation, with a nearly fixed orientation, can be distorted primarily under the lunisolar perturbations. To accommodate science payload requirements, one must optimize the orbits to stabilize the configuration in terms of arm-length, relative velocity, and breathing angle variations. In this work, we present an efficient optimization method and investigate how changing the two main design factors, i.e., the orbital orientation and radius, impacts the constellation stability through single-variable studies. Thereby, one can arrive at the ranges of the orbital parameters that are comparatively more stable, which may assist future refined orbit design.