Chaos in a tethered satellite system induced by atmospheric drag and Earth’s oblateness

Abstract

This paper describes the chaos behavior of an in-plane tethered satellite system induced by atmospheric drag and the Earth’s oblateness. A commonly used model, the dumbbell model, for tethered satellite systems is employed in this study. After taking the atmospheric drag and the Earth’s oblateness into account, the complicated dynamics of chaotic features are observed in the pitch motion of the dumbbell model. Afterward, the existence of the chaos is computed by transversal heteroclinic orbits, and accordingly, the parameter domain for the occurrence of chaos is obtained by the Melnikov function. Furthermore, a tether length control based on a sliding-mode controller is proposed to suppress the chaotic motion. Finally, the numerical simulations in this paper demonstrate the occurrence of the chaotic phenomenon and its control performance.