The main perturbing objects on the orbits of (616) Prometheus and (617) Pandora

TL;DR

This study investigates the chaotic orbital evolution of Saturn's moons Prometheus and Pandora, revealing that multiple major satellites influence their dynamics beyond their mutual interactions.

Contribution

It identifies the significant role of other Saturnian satellites in the chaotic evolution of Prometheus and Pandora's orbits, beyond their mutual gravitational effects.

Findings

Almost all major Saturnian satellites impact the pair's orbital evolution.

The chaotic behavior has a Lyapunov time of approximately 3.3 years.

Anti-alignment of apses amplifies chaos during specific configurations.

Abstract

The dynamical evolution of the Prometheus and Pandora pair of satellites is chaotic, with a short 3.3 years Lyapunov time. It is known that the anti-alignment of the apses line of Prometheus and Pandora, which occurs every 6.2 years, is a critical configuration that amplifies their chaotic dynamical evolution. However, the mutual interaction between Prometheus and Pandora is not enough to explain the longitudinal lags observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The main goal of the current work is to identify the main contributors to the chaotic dynamical evolution of the Prometheus-Pandora pair beyond themselves. Therefore, in this work, we first explore the sensibility of this dynamical system to understand it numerically and then build numerical experiments to reach our goals. We identified that almost all major satellites of the Saturn system play a significant role in the evolution of Prometheus' and Pandora's orbits.