Homoclinic dynamics in a spatial restricted four-body problem: blue skies into Smale horseshoes for vertical Lyapunov families

The set of transverse homoclinic intersections for a saddle-focus equilibrium in the planar equilateral restricted four-body problem admits certain simple homoclinic orbits which form the skeleton of the complete homoclinic intersection—or homoclinic web. In the present work, the planar restricted four-body problem is viewed as an invariant subsystem of the spatial problem, and the influence of this planar homoclinic skeleton on the spatial dynamics is studied from a numerical point of view. Starting from the vertical Lyapunov families emanating from saddle-focus equilibria, we compute the stable/unstable manifolds of these spatial periodic orbits and look for intersections between these manifolds near the fundamental planar homoclinics. In this way, we are able to continue all of the basic planar homoclinic motions into the spatial problem as homoclinics for appropriate vertical Lyapunov orbits which, by the Smale tangle theorem, suggest the existence of chaotic motions in the spatial problem. While the saddle-focus equilibrium solutions in the planar problems occur only at a discrete set of energy levels, the cycle-to-cycle homoclinics in the spatial problem are robust with respect to small changes in energy.