DROMO PROPAGATOR REVISITED

摘要

In year 1000 a house-made orbital propagator was developed by the SDG-UPM (former Grupo de Einiamica de Tethers) based in a set of redundant variables including Euler parameters. This propagator was called DROMO and it was mainly used in numerical simulations of electrodynamic tethers. It was presented for the first time in the international meeting V Jornadas de Trabajo en Mecanica Celeste, held in Albarracin, Spain, in 2002 (see reference 1). The special perturbation method associated with DROMO can be consulted in the paper. In year 1975, Andre Deprit in reference 3 proposes a propagation scheme very similar to the one in which DROMO is based, by using the ideal frame concept of Hansen The different approaches used in references 3 and 2 gave rise to a small controversy. In this paper wecarried out a different deduction of the DROMO propagator, underlining its close relation with the Hansen ideal frame concept, and also the simimarities and the differences with the theory carried out by Deprit in 3. Simultaneously we introduce some improvements in the formulation that leads to amore synthetic propagator.