AAS 97-682
INVESTIGATION OF NEARBY SOLUTIONS OF EULER'S ROTATIONAL EQUATIONS
S. Tanygin, D.L. Richardson, T. Williams - University of Cincinnati
Abstract
This paper deals with the attitude dynamics of an asymmetric spacecraft. One of the important dynamical questions is how fast the initial angular velocity perturbations propagate in time. In practice, such perturbations are inevitable in the presence of mass and geometrical variations. Expansion of nearby trajectories quantified by the Lyapunov exponent spectrum is studied in this paper. Such an expansion occurs rapidly for various initial conditions in the cases of both torque-free and forced rotations.