Analysis of Smart Dust-Based Frozen Orbits Around Mercury

According to the classical two-body Keplerian model, the orbital parameters of a spacecraft are constant during a mission. However, real-life spacecraft motion is different from a classical Keplerian model due to the presence of perturbing forces, whose effects are usually undesirable, especially for observation and communication spacecraft that require accurate pointing capabilities. Therefore, active control systems are usually required to maintain the working orbit. However, an alternative strategy consists of suitably selecting the initial orbital elements to generate a “frozen orbit”, which on average maintains some of the design orbital elements. The utilization of spacecraft with large area-to-mass ratio could extend the flexibility on the initial choice of orbital parameters. In this context, a novel option is represented by smart dusts (SDs), which are femto-satellites with large area-to-mass ratio (or millimeter-scale solar sails). In this chapter, a double-averaging technique is used to determine planetocentric frozen orbits maintained by SDs. In particular, a numerical analysis of frozen orbits is discussed, with a special application focused on orbits around Mercury, which are fit for an SD-based scenario due to their closeness to the Sun and the absence of atmospheric drag.