Grigoriadis, Karolos M.2014-11-212014-11-21August 2012012-08http://hdl.handle.net/10657/765The Multi-Resolution Quadrature (MRQ) Sphere model, is a newly developed multi- resolution gravity model designed to estimate the gravity fields of arbitrary shaped space bodies, such as asteroids. The MRQ Sphere model uses two recently developed mathematical techniques to approximate the standard spherical harmonics. One of these tools approximates the radial decay terms using the sum of Gaussians, while the other is used for estimating the angular functions on the nodes of the quadratures of a sphere. In this work, we apply the MRQ sphere technique to the classic orbit propagation problem and compare the propagated orbit with that generated by the spherical harmonics method. We validate the methods with Earth as the primary body, and propagate the orbit of test cases such as the LAser GEOdynamics Satellite-II (LAGEOS-II) and the GPS BIIA-10 (PRN 32) satellite. We find that the MRQ-Sphere model may be applicable to orbit propagation up to a user dependent approximation.application/pdfengThe author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).Orbit PropagationGravity EstimationMRQ-SphereSpherical harmonicsLAGEOS-IIGPS BIIA-10Cartesian FormulationKepplerian elementsGravity PotentialOrbital MechanicsAerospace engineering2014-11-21Thesisborn digital