INTERMITTENT TRAJECTORIES IN THE 3 1 JOVIAN RESONANCE/

The statistical behaviour of intermittent trajectories at the 3/1 reso nance is investigated. The elliptic planar restricted three-body probl em is used as a model. Distribution functions for time intervals D bet ween eccentricity bursts are obtained and theoretically interpreted. F or smaller values of D, the distribution is found to be of Poisson typ e, while in its tail it is described by a power law D-alpha. This chan ge in the distribution occurs for values of D in the range 10(5)-10(6) Jupiter periods. The power-law index alpha for the integral distribut ions lies in the range (-2, -1) and is trajectory dependent. The algeb raic decay in the tails of the distributions is explained by the pheno menon of sticking of orbits to the chaos border during long intervals between bursts.