Dynamics of "jumping" Trojans: perturbative treatment

Abstract

The term "jumping" Trojan was introduced by Tsiganis et al. (2000) in their studies of long-term dynamics exhibited by the asteroid (1868) Thersites, which had been observed to jump from librations around L4 to librations around L5. Another example of a "jumping" Trojan was found by Connors et al. (2011): librations of the asteroid 2010 TK7 around the Earth's libration point L4 preceded by its librations around L5. We explore the dynamics of "jumping" Trojans under the scope of the restricted planar elliptical three-body problem. Via double numerical averaging we construct evolutionary equations, which allow analyzing transitions between the orbital motion regimes.