On the stability of a resonant rotation of a satellite in an elliptic orbit

We deal with the problem of stability for a resonant rotation of a satellite. It is supposed that the satellite is a rigid body whose center of mass moves in an elliptic orbit. The resonant rotation is a planar motion such that the body completes one rotation in absolute space during two orbital revolutions of its center of mass. The stability analysis of the resonant rotation with respect to planar perturbations has been performed in detail earlier. In this paper we investigate the stability of the resonant rotation with respect to both planar and spatial perturbations for a nonsymmetric satellite. For small values of the eccentricity we have obtained boundaries of instability domains (parametric resonance domains) in an analytic form. For arbitrary eccentricity values we numerically construct domains of stability in linear approximation. Outside the above stability domains the resonant rotation is unstable in the sense of Lyapunov.