Interaction between attitude libration and orbital motion of a rigid body in a near keplerian orbit of low eccentricity

Interaction between orbital motion and attitude libration dynamics of an arbitrary rigid body moving in a central Newtonian field is considered to second order. Advantage is taken of the decoupling between inplane-pitch and roll-yaw out-of-plane motion to restrict the motion to the orbital plane by an appropriate choice ofinitial conditions. An averaged solution to the nonlinear inplane-pitch equations whose accuracy is determined by ignoring terms of order {·G3²/a², ²,²,G3²/a²} and higher is presented. The results show that the near-resonant motion is characterized by a periodic interchange of energy between the attitude and orbital motion.Associate Professor, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.