Future AMSAT missions to place communications payloads in high altitude orbits will almost certainly involve the use of electric propulsion to move the satellite from an initial orbit to a more desirable orbit that will support a long-lived communications mission (1). AMSAT will need to acquire suitable software tools to plan and execute such continuous thrust missions. Mission planning software must model all of the forces acting on a satellite including solar and lunar gravity perturbations, solar radiation pressure, atmospheric drag and a high order Earth gravity model and must integrate these effects over a long period of time to predict the orbital behavior of the satellite months or years into the future.
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