Look into "Chaos Theory", "Control Theory" and "Damping". In particular, consider how you would damp an undesired movement by a satellite. A naive approach wou

Look into "Chaos Theory", "Control Theory" and "Damping". In particular, consider how you would damp an undesired movement by a satellite. A naive approach would be to apply thrust in the opposite direction. However, the control can't be exact, leading to thrust -> thrust <- over and over, eventually to the measurement limit of the thruster's control. With a large mass, it's replaced with a spring, and converted to heat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping