The motion of a stationary satellite in the neighbourhood of the equilibrium points of a central potential perturbed by the J22 term.

In this paper the position and the characteristics of the equilibrium points of a planet gravitational potential are studied as functions of the J(22) parameter under the assumption that the potential is truncated to the first tesseral harmonic V = V(0) + J(22) V(22). The variational equations are solved analytically in the neighborhood of these points to determine the possible periodic orbits of a stationary satellite in the equatorial plane. A numerical investigation of the problem is reported with the presentation of some periodic orbits of different families of stable and unstable type.