Dynamics of a gyrostat satellite with the vector of gyrostatic moment tangent to the orbital plane

Abstract

In this paper, a gyrostat satellite in a circular orbit with its gyrostatic moment tangent to the orbital plane and collinear with the orbital speed is studied regarding its equilibria, bifurcation of equilibria, and asymptotic stability conditions. In the general case, where any gyrostat angular momentum is aligned with any of the orbital coordinate frames, interesting results arose regarding its equilibria bifurcation regarding conditions near to the ones presented in this paper, namely equilibria regions outside their main regions near to the orbital plane tangent. For equilibria and bifurcation of equilibria, a symbolic-numerical method is used to obtain the polynomial equations in function of non-dimensional parameters whose roots are equivalent to the number of equilibria positions. For the asymptotic stability, the results are tested using the Lyapunov stability theory scheme.