Abstract
The stability of attitude equilibria relative to gravitational torques for a rigid satellite in a circular orbit has been divided into three inertia regions, the Lagrange region of assured Liapunov stability, the Beletskii-Delp region which is often described as stabilized due to gyroscopic coupling, and an assured instability region. The generalization of these regions to the case of dual-spin or gyrostat satellites whose internal spin momentum is along a principal axis is treated here. The stability boundaries are obtained for all possible equilibrium orientations for such vehicles, and the variations of these boundaries corresponding to changes in the internal momentum magnitude, or to aligning the momentum with a different principal axis, are determined.
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Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Institut für Mechanik; on sabbatical leave from Columbia University, New York, U.S.A.
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Longman, R., Hagedorn, P. & Beck, A. Stabilization due to gyroscopic coupling in dual-spin satellites subject to gravitational torques. Celestial Mechanics 25, 353–373 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01234177
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01234177