Maclean, Craig David and Biggs, James (2012) Attitude motion planning for a spin stabilised disk sail. In: 63rd International Astronautical Congress, 2012-10-01 - 2012-10-05.
Maclean_C_Biggs_JD_Pure_Attitude_motion_planning_for_a_spin_stabilised_disk_sail_Sep_2012.pdf - Draft Version
While solar sails are capable of providing continuous low thrust propulsion the size and flexibility of the sail structure poses difficulties to their attitude control. Rapid slewing of the sail can cause excitation of structural modes, resulting in flexing and oscillation of the sail film and a subsequent loss of performance and decrease in controllability. Disk shaped solar sails are particularly flexible as they have no supporting structure and so these spacecraft must be spun around their major axis to stiffen the sail membrane via the centrifugal force. In addition to stiffening the structure this spin stabilisation also provides gyroscopic stiffness to disturbances, aiding the spacecraft in maintaining its desired attitude. A method is applied which generates smooth reference motions between arbitrary orientations for a spin-stabilised disk sail. The method minimises the sum square of the body rates of the spacecraft, therefore ensuring that the generated attitude slews are slow and smooth, while the spin stabilisation provides gyroscopic stiffness to disturbances. An application of Pontryagin’s maximum principle yields an optimal Hamiltonian which is completely solvable in closed form. The resulting analytical expressions are a function of several free parameters enabling parametric optimisation to be used to provide reference motions which match prescribed boundary conditions on the initial and final configurations. The generated reference motions are utilised in the repointing of a 70m radius spin-stabilised disk solar sail in a heliocentric orbit, with the aim of assessing the feasibility of the motion planning method in terms of the control torques required to track the motions.
|Item type:||Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)|
|Keywords:||solar sail, motion planning, geometric control, Mechanical engineering and machinery, Motor vehicles. Aeronautics. Astronautics, Aerospace Engineering, Control and Systems Engineering|
|Subjects:||Technology > Mechanical engineering and machinery
Technology > Motor vehicles. Aeronautics. Astronautics
|Department:||Faculty of Engineering > Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Technology and Innovation Centre > Advanced Engineering and Manufacturing
|Depositing user:||Pure Administrator|
|Date Deposited:||11 Sep 2012 15:24|
|Last modified:||06 May 2016 15:27|