Dynamics of a stochastically perturbed two-body problem
In classical mechanics, the two-body problem has been well studied. The governing equations form a system of two-coupled second-order nonlinear differential equations for the radial and angular coordinates. The perturbation induced by the astronomical disturbance like ‘dust’ is normally not considered in the orbit dynamics. Distributed dust produces an additional random force on the orbiting particle, which can be modelled as a random force having ‘Gaussian statistics’. The estimation of accurate positioning of the orbiting particle is not possible without accounting for the stochastic perturbation felt by the orbiting particle. The objective of this paper is to use the stochastic differential equation (SDE) formalism to study the effect of such disturbances on the orbiting body. Specifically, in this paper, we linearize SDEs about the mean of the state vector. The linearization operation performed above, transforms the system of SDEs into another system of SDEs that resembles a bilinear system, as described in signal processing and control literature. However, the mean trajectory of the resulting bilinear stochastic differential model does not preserve the perturbation effect felt by the orbiting particle; only the variance trajectory includes the perturbation effect. For this reason, the effectiveness of the dust-perturbed model is examined on the basis of the bilinear and second-order approximations of the system nonlinearity . The bilinear and second-order approximations of the system nonlinearity allow substantial simplifications for the numerical implementation and preserve some of the properties of the original stochastically perturbed model. Most notably, this paper reveals that the Brownian motion process is accurate to model and study the effect of dust perturbation on the orbiting particle. In addition, analytical findings are supported with finite difference method-based numerical simulations.