On Permanent Rotations of a System of Two Coupled Gyrostats in a Central Newtonian Force Field
This paper studies the problem of the motion of a chain of two gyrostats coupled by an ideal spherical joint. The chain moves about a fixed point in a central Newtonian force field. Under the assumption that the gyrostatic moment of each gyrostat is constant relative to its carrier, the paper establishes and analyzes the conditions for existence of the chain’s permanent rotations about a vertical axis. For a case when each gyrostat has the mass distribution analogous to the one of a Lagrange gyroscope, the paper derives and analyzes the necessary conditions for stability of the permanent rotations. The findings of the paper extend corresponding results in the dynamics of a single gyrostat to a case of the multibody chain as well as generalize some of the known properties of permanent rotations in the many-body dynamics.