Impact of orbital orientations and radii on TianQin constellation stability

Understand

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 work, 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.