Orbital effects of the Magnus force on a spinning spherical satellite in a rarefied atmosphere

The effects of the Magnus force on a spinning sphere in a Keplerian orbit is investigated using perturbation theory. The result is that the plane of the orbit will rotate with the angular velocity , where ατ is the accommodation coefficient of tangential momentum, m and n are the mass and number density of the surrounding gas, and where ρS and ω are the mean density and the angular velocity of the sphere. It is shown that under reasonable assumptions, for a spinning satellite in the Earth's atmosphere, this effect is small.