Talk:Areostationary orbit

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Stationkeeping - Phobos and Demios

This is with reference to the "Stationkeeping Section"

Any satellites in areostationary orbit will likely suffer from increased orbital station keeping costs, because the Clarke belt of Mars lies between the orbits of the planet's two natural satellites. Phobos has a semi-major axis of 9,376 km, and Deimos has a semi-major axis of 23,463 km. The close proximity to Phobos in particular (the larger of the two moons) will cause unwanted orbital resonance effects that will gradually shift the orbit of areostationary satellites.

The citation needed is well deserved. It stands to reason that Phobos and Deimos are too small to have a substantial effect on the orbit of a satellite, with Phobos having just 1/7000000th the mass of Earth's moon, and Deimos being 1/5th as large as Phobos.

I did some original research using numerical simulation which shows that Phobos does shift the orbit, but does so extremely slowly, less than 1 arcsecond per month, and the stationkeeping requirements to account for the influence of Phobos, while real, would be very small (probably less than 0.05 m/s per year). It is hard to find any published research references to perturbations caused by Phobos and Deimos on the orbits of martian satellites and those references generally just dismiss the moons stating the lumpiness of the martian gravity field is much more significant. Furthermore, original research again, it would seem that for a typical solar-powered satellite radiation pressure from the Sun would generally exceed the effect of the gravity of Phobos.

While I only have original research to indicate that this section is substantially incorrect/misleading I could also find no references to it being substantially correct. A section on stationkeeping should either go into the actual factors (lumpiness of martian gravity, sun's gravity, radiation pressure, Phobos and Deimos) and their respective magnitudes, or this section as it currently is should be removed as being vague and misleading.

BlakeMM (talk) 10:53, 11 January 2020 (UTC)