Semi-analytical investigations of the long term evolution of the eccentricity of Galileo and GPS-like orbits

International audienceThis paper aims at investigating the stability over 150 years of a very large number of trajectories in the Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) region, near the orbits devoted to radionavigation such as the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS like GPS, Glonass, Galileo, COMPASS). The stability is characterized by the long term evolution of the eccentricity, and a stable orbit will be defined by initial conditions not inducing through gravitational perturbations a high difference between the perigee and apogee altitudes over a 150 years (for keeping as low as possible the collision risk with operational orbits). The initial conditions of motion used for our tests cover a wide range of semi-major axes and inclinations, regularly sampled, so as to describe as exhaustively as possible the gravitational perturbations acting on the space debris population in these regions. In this study, we pay particular attention to the dynamical properties which can make the orbits eccentricity becoming very large, due to effects induced by the non-spherical shape of the Earth, and the luni-solar attraction, with an amplitude governed by the satellite inclination, as well. We show that even if apogee and perigee variations must be limited to less than 300 km (corresponding to a maximum allowed eccentricity growth of 0.01), there are some cases where the eccentricity growth can rise up to the order of 0.7 over a few decades. The paper is organized such as follows. We begin with the general and historical background of the study. We then give some detail about the semi-analytical modelling than we will propagate with about 36,000 various initial conditions over 150 years. These simulations are based on a parallelized code which works on a "Grid" with about 60,000 CPUs available, ensuring reasonable integration times. First interpretations are then addressed, from an analytical point of view, searching for combinations of angles and initial conditions inducing very long periodic terms in the temporal variations of the eccentricity