The stability of a particular motion of a solid with a viscoelastic membrane in a circular orbit (Q1314113)

The author studies the practically very important question of the influence of deformability of a satellite on the stability of its attitude motion. The satellite is moving on a circular orbit in a central Newtonian gravitational field and is modelled as a coupled system of a rigid body and a rotationally symmetric viscoelastic membrane whose axis of rotation is also a symmetry axis of the whole system. The attitude motion investigated for the stability is the rotation of the membrane in the orbital plane. It is shown that in fact, due to the deformability of the membrane, the stability regions in parameter space are reduced compared to a system with a rigid membrane. In the analysis use is made of the stability theory concerning only a part of the variables.