Orbital stability near the (87) Sylvia system

Abstract

The main goal of our work is to study the equatorial orbital dynamics of a spacecraft near the (87) Sylvia sys-tem. Here, we consider a non-homogeneous mass distribution with a dense core inside the primary asteroid. The Mascon gravity framework using the shaped polyhedral source, from lightcurve data, is chosen to cal-culate the gravitational field. The zero-velocity curves show four unstable equilibrium points. In the absence of any solar or other celestial body perturbations, a numerical analysis of the orbital dynamics in the potential field of Sylvia is done to delineate the region of stable and unstable motions.