Abstract
According to the concept of active debris removal, named “ion beam shepherd”, a shepherd satellite must be controlled to move at a certain small distance in front of a space debris object during the de-orbiting phase. Due to the considerable duration of this phase, the propellant consumption is a key driver for the control system design. As shown in recent studies, the in-plane relative motion of such a formation can be controlled using a thrust variation of only one compensation thruster of the shepherd. This control strategy allows designers to significantly reduce the propellant mass needed to fulfill a de-orbiting mission but does not ensure the controllability of the formation in the out-of-plane direction. To fill this gap this paper proposes to deviate the yaw attitude of the shepherd for applying control actions in the out-of-plane direction. The laws of the yaw angle variation are designed to effectively damp out the out-of-plane oscillations. Computer simulations demonstrate that a required relative spatial position of the formation can be maintained by varying only two values: the yaw angle of the shepherd and thrust of the compensation thruster. The analysis shows that the de-orbiting rate deteriorates insignificantly due to the attitude deviation of the ion beam.
Published Version
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