Chaotic pitch motion of an asymmetric non-rigid spacecraft with viscous drag in circular orbit

We study the pitch motion dynamics of an asymmetric spacecraft in circular orbit under the influence of a gravity gradient torque. The spacecraft is perturbed by a small aerodynamic drag torque proportional to the angular velocity of the body about its mass center. We also suppose that one of the moments of inertia of the spacecraft is a periodic function of time. Under both perturbations, we show that the system exhibits a transient chaotic behavior by means of the Melnikov method. This method gives us an analytical criterion for heteroclinic chaos in terms of the system parameters which is numerically contrasted. We also show that some periodic orbits survive for perturbation small enough.