Impact of orbital orientations and radii on TianQin constellation stability

Abstract

<jats:p> TianQin is a proposed space-based gravitational-wave observatory mission to be deployed in high circular Earth orbits. The equilateral-triangle constellation, with a nearly fixed orientation, can be distorted primarily under the lunisolar perturbations. To accommodate science payload requirements, one must optimize the orbits to stabilize the configuration in terms of arm-length, relative velocity, and breathing angle variations. In this paper, we present an efficient optimization method and investigate how changing the two main design factors, i.e. the orbital orientation and radius, impacts the constellation stability through single-variable studies. Thereby, one can arrive at the ranges of the orbital parameters that are comparatively more stable, which may assist future refined orbit design. </jats:p>

Concepts and status of Chinese space gravitational wave detection projects

“…To avoid these problems or mitigate their impact, very careful orbit optimizations and controls have been studied in a series of papers [74][75][76][77] . It was confirmed that choosing high Earth orbits can free TianQin from the disturbing effect of the nearby gravitational field of the Earth-Moon system, because the Newtonian gravity-field environment at 10 5 km from the Earth is fairly quiet and the effect of the Earth-Moon system's gravity field dominates at frequencies below 10 −4 Hz and falls off rapidly towards high frequencies 76 .…”

Science with the TianQin Observatory: Preliminary Results on Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background

“…There exist a few programs for the space-borne GW detectors [6,[35][36][37][38]. In this work, we constrain our focus on TianQin [35,39,40] (and LISA [6] when a network is considered). TianQin is expected to explore GW astronomy as well as fundemantal physics during its operation [8-12, 41, 42].…”

Constraining the cosmological parameters using gravitational wave observations of massive black hole binaries and statistical redshift information

“…Such detections are also expected to put stringent constraints on deviation of general relativity or testing specific gravity theory [66,67]. Studies has revealed the availability of stable orbits that fulfills the requirement for GW detections [68][69][70][71]. The technology demonstration satellite, TianQin-1, has met the designed requirement [72].…”