Stabilizing Motion Relative to an Unstable Orbit: Applications to Spacecraft Formation Flight

Abstract

Acontrol lawisderivedandanalyzed thatstabilizesa classof unstableperiodicorbitsin theHillrestrictedthreebody problem. The control law is derived by stabilizing the short-time dynamics of motion about a trajectory by the use of a feedback law specie ed by the instantaneous eigenvalue and eigenvector structure of the trajectory. This law naturally generalizes to a continuous control law along an orbit. By applying the control to an unstable periodic orbit, we can explicitly compute the stability of the control over long periods of time by computing the monodromy matrix of the periodic orbit with its neighborhood modie ed via the control law. For the case of an unstable halo periodic orbit in the Hill restricted three-body problem, we e nd that the entire periodic orbit can be stabilized. The resulting stable periodic orbits have three distinct oscillation modes in their center manifold. We discuss how this control can be applied to formation e ight about a halo orbit. Some practical implementation issues of the control are also considered. We show that the control acceleration can be provided by a low-thrust engine and that the total fuel cost of the control can be quite reasonable. I. Introduction T HIS paper studies the stabilization of an unstable periodic orbit in the Hill problem, which can serve as a general model for motion in the Earth‐ sun system. Results of this study will be relevant to the dynamics and control of a constellation of spacecraft in an unstable orbitalenvironment such as found near the Earth‐ sun libration points. It will also shed light on the practical control and computation of a single spacecraft trajectory in an unstable orbital environment over long time spans. We investigate the application of feedback control laws to stabilize a periodic orbit in the sense of Lyapunov (see Ref. 1) (note, not asymptotic stability). Thus, the stabilized trajectory will consist of oscillatory motions about the nominal trajectory, which in this context can be interpreted as motions in the center manifold of the stabilized periodic orbit. We show that an entire class of such control laws can be dee ned and their stability analyzed as a timeperiodic linear system. The fuel expenditure for such control laws is often quite small and scales with the mean distance between the controlled motion and the nominal trajectory (which is a periodic orbit in this application). The problem of spacecraft control in unstable orbits is not new. (See Refs. 2 and 3 for reviews.) However, these previous studies have focused on stationkeeping control for a single spacecraft and have not considered how the relative motion of a formation of spacecraft could be stabilized and their dynamics modie ed, which is what we consider here. Proposed space observatories of the future include ambitious interferometricimagersthatusebaselinesofhundredsorthousandsof kilometers between spacecraft to attain sufe ciently high resolutions to image planets around distant stars. To carry out these imaging procedures requires that the relative motion between spacecraft be known extremely accurately and that the spacecraft “ e ll in” an effective image e eld as they move relative to each other. A periodic