Impulsive control strategy for spacecraft formation flying using orbital drift

Abstract

In recent years, spacecraft formation flying has received significant attention. Various formation flying missions were planed and have been progressed, for example, interferometric SAR, 3D image acquisition, finding Earth-like planets, etc. By the way, to establish and maintain the missions, proximity orbit transfer is required in formation flying. Primary goals of the transfer are formation construction, formation reconfiguration, and formation keeping. In this study, we are focusing on the impulsive orbit transfer schemes, which utilize two or multiple impulses to achieve desired formation. In this dissertation, we develop the analytical impulsive control methods in designing impulse moments for impulse minimization. A physical property, the drift motion between satellites, is studied to design the optimal transfer algorithm. Two impulsive control methods, which are two- and four- impulse methods, and an integrated impulsive strategy are proposed. Furthermore, simulation examples are employed to verify the performance of the proposed methods. The followings summarize the considered problem and solutions suggested in this dissertation. First, two-impulse orbit correction method is developed. Because of nonlinearity of dynamics, most of the researches find the optimal impulse moments through numerical optimization. The optimal solution can output a solution that leads the minimum impulse, but the solution needs iterative steps and computation time might be too lengthy. In this dissertation, we attempt to obtain the analytic solution with a few assumptions. The drift effect, which occurs when the orbit periods of the two satellites are not the same, is employed in developing the new algorithm. By analyzing the total impulse variation due to the drift, we can get the impulse moments for impulse minimization. Second, four-impulse method is newly designed. Increasing the number of impulses often saves the total impulse. However, surely impulse time schedule with ...