Development of analytical orbit propagation technique with drag

Abstract

Two orbit computation methods were used: (1) numerical method- The solution to the satellite differential equations were solved in a step-by-step manner, using a mathematical algorithm taken from numerical analysis; and (2) analytical method - The solution was expressed by explicit functions of the independent variable. Analytical drag modules, tesseral terms initialization module, second order and long period terms module, and verification testing of the ASOP program were also considered.