“…During the last few decades, studies on the periodic solutions and the attitude stability of a rigid body in an elliptical orbit mainly discussed simple systems such as dynamically symmetric rigid body and dumbbell satellites etc. Although the stability of the relative equilibrium of a mutibody spacecraft in a circular orbit has been studied extensively [27,28,29,30,31], to the best of authors' knowledge, there are no investigations about the attitude stability of multibody systems in an elliptical orbit at the moment. Therefore, we focus on the attitude stability of a flexible connected two-body system in an elliptical orbit.…”