Re: [Orekit Users] Recommendation for lifetime analysis

[<bogdan.udrea@vissidus.com>]

Evan,

Thank you for the clarification.

My application is a low cardinality swarm (a dozen or so) of smallsats that
have to detumble and form the swarm before they separate "too much" and start
decaying.  Hence the need to perform sensitivity analysis on orbit injection
and orbit lifetime.

Before I posted the question I propagated a few orbits with the
ClassicalRungeKutta and Luther integrators which included only J2 and Harris-
Priester atmospheric model for perturbations with steps of 600s. The results
where nowhere close to the ones for orbit decay in the tables at the end of
Wertz' New SMAD. Since only a few of the assumptions were published in the
book I decided to ask the community for a best practice for orbit lifetime
integration before I proceeded with trial and error.

Best regards,

Bogdan