Solar Gravity

Author: Tianjiang Shuo

Website: https://cislunarspace.cn

Definition

The gravitational force exerted by the Sun on spacecraft within the Earth-Moon system, and the dominant perturbation source near triangular libration points. Incorporating solar gravity into the restricted three-body problem yields the restricted four-body problem, which is not analytically solvable. In NASA's Swingby software, the Sun-Earth distance is set to 1 AU, and the Sun's gravitational constant is 333,000 times that of the Earth. For relative motion near triangular libration points, neglecting solar gravity produces peak errors of approximately 110 km (about 1800% of the relative position), so it must be included in any accurate model.

Application Value

用于分析航天器在复杂引力场中的运动特性 用于评估导航系统的精度上限，指导滤波器设计。

References

• Catlin and McLaughlin, 2007