Robustness and Maintenance of Quasi-Satellite Orbits around Phobos

Abstract

The Martian moons pose one of the many unanswered questions regarding the bodies found in the Solar System. As a result, the Japanese Space Agency is developing the so-called Martian Moons eXploration mission (MMX) with the objective of landing in Phobos to retrieve a sample and bring it back to Earth. To land, the spacecraft must first orbit around the moon, where a very rich and complex dynamical environment with several perturbing accelerations is found. This thesis has therefore focused on developing a high precission orbital propagator for the MMX mission. To that end, a spherical harmonics model for the gravity of Mars, a constant density polyhedron for Phobos, solar radiation pressure and sun gravity have been taken into account, and the effect of these perturbations has been studied for a low-altitude Quasi-Satellite Orbit.