Evaluation of the Modified Picard-Chebyshev Method for High-Precision Orbit Propagation
Publication: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 28, Issue 5
Abstract
The modified Picard-Chebyshev method, due to its formulation, has the potential for computationally efficient orbit propagation in a parallel computing environment. However, it has not found extensive use in commercial software applications, primarily due to its instability over long orbit propagation times. In this paper, the method was evaluated based on the propagation of several test orbits with a high-precision force model available through NASA’s Java Astrodynamics toolkit. The goal was to analyze the stability properties of the method, with emphasis on its dependence on the initial guess and the order of the approximating Chebyshev polynomial. Simulation results indicated a dependence of the method on the precision of the computation as well. Additionally, the performance of the method when implemented in parallel was evaluated by propagating the orbits on a multicore processing unit and comparing run times to well-known sequential numerical propagators. The preliminary results show that the run-time performance of the MPCM improves with the complexity in the computation, but further investigations are necessary to establish the capabilities of the method.
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Published In
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 28 • Issue 5 • September 2015
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 16, 2014
Accepted: Aug 19, 2014
Published online: Oct 1, 2014
Discussion open until: Mar 1, 2015
Published in print: Sep 1, 2015
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