Control moment gyros (CMGs) are spacecraft attitude control actuators which act as torque amplifiers. They are thus suitable for attitude hold and reorientation of large spacecraft or for slew maneuvering. They provide the necessary torques via gimballing a spinning flywheel. A major problem encountered with the use of CMGs in practice is the possibility of singularities for certain combination...

Control problem of a spacecraft is an important topic in automatic control engineering. A body orbiting the Earth in geosynchronous orbit has instabilities in attitude dynamics and disturbances caused by the Earth, the Moon, the Sun and other bodies in space. These effects force the body to lose initial orbit and attitude. Here the control system takes important part of spacecraft missions wher...

-The attitude stabilization problem of a rigid spacecraft using control torques supplied by gas jet actuators about only two of its principal axes is considered. If the uncontrolled principal axis of the spacecraft is not an axis of symmetry, then the complete spacecraft dynamics are small time locally controllable. However, the spacecraft cannot be asymptotically stabilized to any equilibrium ...

It is well known that complete attitude control of a spacecraft is not possible with only one single-gimbal Variable-Speed Control Moment Gyro (VSCMG) due to the conservation of the angular momentum. However, partial attitude control without violating the angular momentum conservation principle is still possible. In this paper, feedback controllers that stabilize the angular velocity vector of ...

The attitude tracking control problem of uncertain rigid spacecraft without angular velocity measurements is addressed in this paper. The adaptive control law, which incorporates a velocity-generating filter from attitude measurements, is shown to ensure the asymptotic convergence of the attitude and angular velocity tracking errors despite unknown spacecraft inertia. Simulation results are pre...

This article contains a description of main ideas for the attitude reorientation of spacecraft (small dual-spin spacecraft, nanosatellites) using properties of its chaotic attitude motion under the action of internal perturbations. The considering method based on intentional initiations of chaotic modes of the attitude motion with big amplitudes of the nutation oscillations, and also on the red...

This article presents the details of a newly constructed 3-dof experimental spacecraft simulator facility at the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The main component of the facility is a cylindrical platform located on a hemi-spherical air bearing that allows friction-free rotation about three axes. The facility includes a variety of actuators and sensors: ...

In this paper the attitude tracking problem is solved for a flexible spacecraft in the case of measurements of the variables describing the attitude error. Such a control could be applied in failure situations for recovering a spacecraft, so increasing the fault tolerance of the spacecraft control system and the success of the mission. The result is a dynamic controller capable of reconstructin...