Earth’s Magnetic Field for Spacecraft Attitude Control Applications (TECHNICAL NOTE)

Spacecraft attitude control using magnetic actuators

Fully magnetic attitude control for spacecraft subject to gravity gradient

This paper presents stability and control analysis of a satellite on a near polar orbit subject to the gravity torque. The satellite is actuated by a set of mutually perpendicular coils. The concept is that interaction between the Earth's magnetic "eld and a magnetic "eld generated by the coils results in a mechanical torque used for attitude corrections. Magnetic actuation due to its simplicit...

Passive Attitude Control for Spacecraft

The stability of spacecraft attitude is studied with considering sinusoidal disturbance. A passive attitude controller without angular velocity measurement for spacecraft described by quaternion is designed. The passive controller has no information related to system parameters. So it has robustness to model error and uncertainty of model parameters. The stability of spacecraft attitude control...

Spacecraft Attitude Tracking Control

The problem of reorienting a spacecraft in to acquire a moving target is investigated. The spacecraft is modeled as a rigid body with N axisymmetric wheels controlled by axial torques, and the kinematics are represented by Modified Rodriques Parameters. The trajectory, denoted the reference trajectory, is one generated by a virtual spacecraft that is identical to the actual spacecraft. The open...

Retrospective Cost Adaptive Control of Spacecraft Attitude Using Magnetic Actuators

We apply retrospective cost adaptive control (RCAC) to spacecraft attitude control with magnetic actuators. We compare two approaches to address the rank deficiency and time-varying nature of the input matrix. The first approach utilizes an average of the magnetic field based on a-priori knowledge, whereas the second approach uses three multi-input, single-output controllers. RCAC uses no infor...

Nonlinear H ∞ for Spacecraft Attitude Control

This paper presents a nonlinear H∞ state feedback attitude control design method for spacecraft large angle maneuvers, which is subject to moment-of-inertia (MOI) uncertainty. Moreover, the operation of attitude maneuver is affected by external disturbances. The attitude control design thus employs a nonlinear H∞ method to achieve stability and robustness so that both MOI uncertainty and extern...