Copyright © 2012 Juan Félix San-Juan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We present a new economic hybrid analytical orbit propagator program based on SARIMA models, which approximates to a tesseral analytical theory for a Quasi-Spot satellite. The J₂ perturbation is described by a first-order closed-form analytical theory, whereas the effects produced by the higher orders of J₂ and the perturbation of the rest of zonal and tesseral harmonic coefficients are modelled by SARIMA models. Time series analysis is a useful statistical prediction tool, which allows building a model for making future predictions based on the study of past observations. The combination of the analytical techniques and time series analysis allows an increase in accuracy without significant loss in efficiency of the new propagators, as a consequence of modelling higher-order terms and other perturbations are not taken into account in the analytical theory.