Dynamics of tetrahedron tethered satellite formation
- Paper number
IAC-06-C1.P.3.03
- Author
Dr. Anna Guerman, University of Beira Interior, Portugal
- Coauthor
Dr. Pedro Paglione, Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica - ITA, Brazil
- Coauthor
Prof. Georgi Smirnov, University of Porto, Portugal
- Coauthor
Mrs. Ana Mª Seabra, Portugal
- Year
2006
- Abstract
Dynamics of multibody connected systems lately attracts a great attention due to various missions and projects under development. One can mention numerous applications to systems for Earth observation, space robots and manipulators, telescopes, atmosphere and magnetosphere experiments, etc. Analysis of three-dimensional dynamics of such system is of special current interest motivated by NASA research program in formation flying. A system that consists of an arbitrary number of satellites connected into an open chain by rigid massless rods was studied analytically in [1] - [2]. All in-plane equilibria were determined in [1]. In [2], all spatial equilibrium configurations of the system were described. It was shown that rods occupy one of the following three positions:
- It can be aligned with the tangent to the orbit of the center of mass of the chain (CMC);
- It can be a member of a group of rods lying in a plane parallel to normal and bi-normal to CMC orbit ( nbn-group), being the center of mass of this group situated on the tangent to CMC orbit;
- It can either join two nbn-groups of rods, or an end of an nbn-group with the tangent to CMC orbit.
Some of equilibrium configurations obtained are actually two-dimensional, being situated in the plane of the orbit, or in one of the two orthogonal planes that pass through the bi-normal and contain either the tangent to CMC orbit or the radius vector of CMC with respect to the center of the Earth. In addition to these equilibria, there exist also a number of essentially three-dimensional configurations, such as tetrahedrons. In the particular case of four identical satellites, the tetrahedron configurations were determined numerically. In the present article, we study these tetrahedron equilibrium configurations of a tethered satellite system. The junctions are spherical hinges. We determine the system configuration and identify the rods that can be substituted by tethers. We examine the possibility to control such system and to stabilize its motion about these spatial equilibria. This work is supported by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology - FCT (Project COMSA, POCTI/EME/58506/2004), and the Portuguese - Brazil cooperation program GRICES-CAPES.
[1] A. D. Guerman. Equilibria of multibody chain in orbit plane. Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics, v. 26, No. 6, 2003, pp. 942-948.
[2] A. D. Guerman. Spatial equilibria of multibody chain in a circular orbit. Acta Astronautica, v. 58, No. 1, pp. 1-14.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-06-C1.P.3.03.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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