Tesseral harmonic perturbations for high order and degree harmonics

Authors:

• Edwin Wnuk

Abstract

A new formula has been derived for geopotential expressed in terms of orbital elements. The summation sequence was changed so that the terms of the same frequencies would be grouped and the generalized lumped coefficients were derived. The proposed formula has the same form for both odd and even l-m. Applying Hori's perturbation method, new formulae were derived for tesseral harmonic perturbations in nonsingular orbital elements:l+g, h, e cos g,e sin g, L, and H. We show the possibility of effective application of the derived formulae to the calculation of orbits of very low satellites taking into account the coefficients of tesseral harmonics of the Earth's gravitational field up to high orders and degrees. As an example the perturbations up to the order and degree of 90 for the orbit of GRM satellites were calculated. The calculations were carried out on an IBM AT personal computer. © 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers.