AAS 97-665
EVALUATION OF J2-PERTURBED APSIS HEIGHT COMPUTATION METHODS
D.R. Adamo - NASA/JSC
Abstract
Accurate computation of apsis heights is nearly always essential to spacecraft mission success. It is often convenient and computationally efficient to perform this task using an analytic method which receives an osculating state vector as input. When periapsis height is sufficiently low, the analytic method must account for perturbations from the J2 zonal gravity harmonic, or inaccuracies and time-dependent inconsistencies will result.
Various analytic methods are applied to the problem of apsis height computation in which otherwise conic spacecraft trajectories are perturbed only by the gravitating body's J2 harmonic. Computation results are presented which serve as the basis for evaluating each method's merit using multiple criteria.