THE EFFECT OF THE EARTHS OBLATENESS ON THE LONG-TERM DISPERSION OF DEBRIS

A model for an analytical prediction of the space debris long-term dispersion, is suggested. The main idea is to compute the variation of the secular orbital elements, assuming a weak explosion as the initial conditions. The instantaneous changes in the orbital elements due to an explosion are evaluated by the Poisson's method for small impulses. Then, the sensitivity of the secular precessing ellipse to these small impulses, is computed. These are combined to form a sensitivity matrix which formulates the long-term dispersion as a linear mapping of the initially perturbed state vector.