Attitude control analysis of tethered de-orbiting

Self-stabilising attitude control for spinning tethered formations

The paper analyses the dynamics of a spinning tethered formation where the tethered units are modelled as extended rigid bodies. The system, composed by two platforms linked by a flexible tether a few hundreds of meters long, constitutes the building block of more complex tethered architectures utilised in proposed space interferometry missions. The issue investigated herein is the transfer of ...

Centralized Dynamics and Control of Novel Orbiting Formations of Tethered Spacecwt*

In this paper we investigate the interaction between an orbiting tethered system and a single spacecraft acting as leader of the tethered formation. This problem arises when a distributed sensor array formed by a chain of tethered data-gathering vehicles is being commanded to reconfigure fi-om a remote location by the formation leader. Another example is a radar-mapping mission where multiple f...

Attitude Stability and Altitude Control of a Variable- Geometry Earth-Orbiting Solar Sail

Adaptive Attitude Tracking Control with L2-gain Performance for an Orbiting Flexible Spacecraft

This paper treats the problem of nonlinear adaptive attitude tracking control of an orbiting flexible spacecraft. It is assumed that the system parameters are unknown and the truncated model of the spacecraft has finite but arbitrary dimension. An adaptive sliding mode control law is derived for a threeaxis stabilized spacecraft attitude tracking control system. The control gains are designed b...

Adaptive Quaternion Attitude Control of Aerodynamic Flight Control Vehicles

Conventional quaternion based methods have been extensively employed for spacecraft attitude control where the aerodynamic forces can be neglected. In the presence of aerodynamic forces, the flight attitude control is more complicated due to aerodynamic moments and inertia uncertainties. In this paper, a robust nero-adaptive quat...