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Rotational modeling of Hyperion
Thomas, Peter C.; Harbison, Rebecca A.; Nicholson, Philip C.
Saturn's moon, Hyperion, is subject to strongly-varying solid body torques from its primary and lacks a stable spin state resonant with its orbital frequency. In fact, its rotation is chaotic, with a Lyapunov timescale on the order of 100 days. In 2005, Cassini made three close passes of Hyperion at intervals of 40 and 67 days, when the moon was i…
Some ring-shaped potentials as a generalized 4-D isotropic oscillator. Periodic orbits
Tresaco, Eva; Ferrer, Sebastián
A generalized integrable biparametric family of 4-D isotropic oscillators is proposed. It allows to treat in a unified way, Pöschl-Teller, Hartmann and other ring-shaped systems. This approach, based in the use of two canonical extensions, helps to simplify the studies of classical aspects of those systems. As an illustration, an analysis of the p…
Titan's rotational state. The effects of a forced ``free'' resonant wobble
Noyelles, Benoît
In Noyelles et al. (Astron. Astrophys. 478, 959–970 (2008)), a resonance involving the wobble of Titan is hinted at. This paper studies this scenario and its consequences. The first step is to build an accurate analytical model that would help to find the likely resonances in the rotation of every synchronous body. In this model, I take the orbita…
On the rotational dynamics of Prometheus and Pandora
Melnikov, A. V.; Shevchenko, I. I.
Possible rotation states of two satellites of Saturn, Prometheus (S16) and Pandora (S17), are studied by means of numerical experiments. The attitude stability of all possible modes of synchronous rotation and the motion close to these modes is analyzed by means of computation of the Lyapunov spectra of the motion. The stability analysis confirms …
Dynamics of two satellites in the 2/1 Mean–Motion resonance: application to the case of Enceladus and Dione
Yokoyama, T.; Callegari, N.
The dynamics of a pair of satellites similar to Enceladus–Dione is investigated with a two-degrees-of-freedom model written in the domain of the planar general three-body problem. Using surfaces of section and spectral analysis methods, we study the phase space of the system in terms of several parameters, including the most recent data. A detaile…
Strands and braids in narrow planetary rings: a scattering system approach
Merlo, Olivier; Benet, Luis
We address the occurrence of narrow planetary rings and some of their structural properties, in particular when the rings are shepherded. We consider the problem as Hamiltonian scattering of a large number of non-interacting massless point particles in an effective potential. Using the existence of stable motion in scattering regions in this set u…