Collinear Point Dynamics of a Dumbbell Satellite in Fast Rotation

For technically feasible tether lengths, the dynamics of fast rotating cable-connected satellites at the collinear points is reduced to an integrable problem depending on two parameters, one related with the tether’s length and the other with the size of the orbit. The reduced dynamics maps orbits of the dumbbell’s center of mass onto points on the sphere and shows how the tether length plays the role of a control parameter that can be used to mimic the relevant features of libration point orbits using orbits of a much smaller size than those spawned by the natural dynamics.