In a recent paper [P. V. P. Cunha, C. A. R. Herdeiro, E. Radu, and H. F. Runarsson, Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 211102 (2015).], it was shown that the lensing of light around rotating boson stars and Kerr black holes with scalar hair can exhibit chaotic patterns. Since no separation of variables is known (or expected) for geodesic motion on these backgrounds, we examine the 2D effective potentials for photon trajectories, to obtain a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. We find that the emergence of stable light rings on the background spacetimes allows the formation of "pockets" in one of the effective potentials, for open sets of impact parameters, leading to an effective trapping of some trajectories, dubbed "quasibound orbits." We conclude that pocket formation induces chaotic scattering, although not all chaotic orbits are associated to pockets. These and other features are illustrated in a gallery of examples, obtained with a new ray-tracing code, PYHOLE, which includes tools for a simple, simultaneous visualization of the effective potential, together with the spacetime trajectory, for any given point in a lensing image. An analysis of photon orbits allows us to further establish a positive correlation between photon orbits in chaotic regions and those with more than one turning point in the radial direction; we recall that the latter is not possible around Kerr black holes. Moreover, we observe that the existence of several light rings around a horizon (several fundamental orbits, including a stable one), is a central ingredient for the existence of multiple shadows of a single hairy black hole. We also exhibit the lensing and shadows by Kerr black holes with scalar hair, observed away from the equatorial plane, obtained with PYHOLE.

Current approaches to uncertainty propagation in astrodynamics mainly refer to linearized models or Monte Carlo simulations. Naive linear methods fail in nonlinear dynamics, whereas Monte Carlo simulations tend to be computationally intensive. Differential algebra has already proven to be an efficient compromise by replacing thousands of pointwise integrations of Monte Carlo runs with the fast evaluation of the arbitrary order Taylor expansion of the flow of the dynamics. However, the current implementation of the DA-based high-order uncertainty propagator fails when the non-linearities of the dynamics prohibit good convergence of the Taylor expansion in one or more directions. We solve this issue by introducing automatic domain splitting. During propagation, the polynomial expansion of the current state is split into two polynomials whenever its truncation error reaches a predefined threshold. The resulting set of polynomials accurately tracks uncertainties, even B Alexander Wittig

Utilizing concepts from dynamical systems theory, we demonstrate how the existence of light rings, or fixed points, in a spacetime will give rise to families of periodic orbits and invariant manifolds in phase space. It is shown that these structures define the shape of the black hole shadow as well as a number of salient features of the spacetime lensing. We illustrate this through the analysis of lensing by a hairy black hole.

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This paper analyzes the real-time relative pose estimation and attitude prediction of a tumbling target spacecraft through a high-order numerical extended Kalman filter based on differential algebra. Indeed, in the differential algebra framework, the Taylor expansion of the phase flow is automatically available once the spacecraft dynamics is integrated and thus the need to write and integrate high-order variational equations is completely avoided making the presented solution easier to implement. To validate the technique, the ESA's e.deorbit mission, involving the Envisat satellite, is used as reference test case. The developed algorithms are implemented on a BeagleBone Black platform, as representative of the limited computational capability available on onboard processors. The performance is assessed by varying the measurement acquisition frequency and processor clock frequency, and considering various levels of uncertainties. A comparison among the different orders of the filter is carried out.