Satellites’ orbital stability through normal forms

Abstract A powerful tool to investigate the stability of the orbits of natural and artificial bodies is represented by perturbation theory, which allows one to provide normal form estimates for nearly-integrable problems in Celestial Mechanics. In particular, we consider the orbital stability of point-mass satellites moving around the Earth. On the basis of the J 2 model, we investigate the stability of the semimajor axis. Using a secular Hamiltonian model including also lunisolar perturbations, the so-called geolunisolar model, we study the stability of the other orbital elements, namely the eccentricity and the inclination. We finally discuss the applicability of Nekhoroshev’s theorem on the exponential stability of the action variables. To this end, we investigate the non-degeneracy properties of the J 2 and geolunisolar models. We obtain that the J 2 model satisfies a “three-jet” non-degeneracy condition, while the geolunisolar model is quasi-convex non-degenerate.