Periodic attitudes and bifurcations of a rigid spacecraft in the second degree and order gravity field of a uniformly rotating asteroid

In this work, periodic attitudes and bifurcations of periodic families are investigated for a rigid spacecraft moving on a stationary orbit around a uniformly rotating asteroid. Under the second degree and order gravity field of an asteroid, the dynamical model of attitude motion is formulated by truncating the integrals of inertia of the spacecraft at the second order. In this dynamical system, the equilibrium attitude has zero Euler angles. The linearised equations of attitude motion are utilised to study the stability of equilibrium attitude. It is found that there are three fundamental types of periodic attitude motions around a stable equilibrium attitude point. We explicitly present the linear solutions around a stable equilibrium attitude, which can be used to provide the initial guesses for computing the true periodic attitudes in the complete model. By means of a numerical approach, three fundamental families of periodic attitudes are studied, and their characteristic curves, distribution of eigenvalues, stability curves and stability distributions are determined. Interestingly, along the characteristic curves of the fundamental families, some critical points are found to exist, and these points correspond to tangent and period-doubling bifurcations. By means of a numerical approach, the bifurcated families of periodic attitudes are identified. The natural and bifurcated families constitute networks of periodic attitude families.