PROBLEM OF SUSTAINED RESONANCE

An investigation of a model for reentry roll resonance is continued. First, numerical integration is employed to verify the main results of earlier work where it was predicted that sustained resonance occurs for initial conditions corresponding to a critical trajectory which tends towards a saddle point in the phase plane. In light of present results a more precise criterion for sustained resonance is given. It is shown that sustained resonance corresponds to trajectories which first approach the saddle point and are then captured by a center. The theoretical results are in good agreement with numerically derived ″exact″ solutions and confirm the fact that the proposed mathematical model does exhibit the phenomenon of sustained resonance observed in the reentry problem.