Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Coupled Orbit-Attitude Dynamics of High Area-to-Mass Ratio (HAMR) Objects: Influence of Solar Radiation Pressure, Earth’s Shadow and the Visibility in Light Curves

Abstract The orbital and attitude dynamics of uncontrolled Earth orbiting ob-jects are perturbed by a variety of sources. In research, emphasis has been put on operational space vehicles. Operational satellites typically have a relatively com-pact shape, and hence, a low area-to-mass ratio (AMR), and are in most cases actively or passively attitude stabilized. This enables one to treat the orbit and attitude propagation as decoupled problems, and in many cases the attitude dy-namics can be neglected completely. The situation is different for space debris objects, which are in an uncontrolled attitude state. Furthermore, the assumption that a steady-state attitude motion can be averaged over data reduction intervals may no longer be valid. Additionally, a subset of the debris objects have sig-nificantly high area-to-mass ratio (HAMR) values, resulting in highly perturbed orbits, e.g. by solar radiation pressure, even if a stable AMR value is assumed. Note, this assumption implies a steady-state attitude such that the average cross-sectional area exposed to the sun is close to constant. Time-varying solar radiation pressure accelerations due to attitude variations will result in un-modeled errors i