[Orekit Users] Recommendation for lifetime analysis

[<bogdan.udrea@vissidus.com>]

Dear Colleagues,

First of all I would like to express my gratitude to the crew at CS and their
collaborators for making Orekit available to the community. I became aware of
Orekit in 2013 at the AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting in Hawaii and
since then I have been lurking in the shadows waiting for the right time to
start working with it. I recently downloaded Orekit 9.1 and I became
productive in less than a day.

I am interested in performing a trade study for the lifetime of a LEO mission
using Orekit propagators. Preliminary design, using tables from Wertz' New
SMAD, shows a lifetime of a few months to a year. The stop condition is a
periapsis altitude of 100km.

I am writing to ask if anyone has a recommendation for a propagator for such a
study. On one hand it seems that DSST would be the fastest but I haven't used
it before. On the other hand, I am tempted by numerical propagators, for their
field propagation, because later on I would like to refine the study and
propagate uncertainties resulting from orbit injection.

Thank you and best regards,

Bogdan