Abstract
The concern with a spinning tethered formation flying system has been recently growing because it can keep the formation precisely enough for synthetic aperture radar and interferometry applications. The system also attracts attention because it is expected to be able to deploy and maintain membrane structures to realize a solar sail spacecraft. This paper discusses a control method of formation deployment for a spinning tethered formation flying system. The control method is based on a virtual structure approach, that is one of various strategies and approaches for conventional multi-spacecraft formation control. We consider two types of formation deployment; spin angular velocity is calculated 1) using a tether tension profile, and 2) using an angular momentum profile. We apply the control methods to formation deployment in a circular orbit around the earth, and discuss results of numerical simulations in terms of maximum thrust and tether tension.
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