AbstractSeveral on-going studies indicate the interest for large, light orbiting structures, shaped as fish nets or webs: along the ropes of the web small spacecraft can move like spiders to position and re-locate, at will, pieces of hardware devoted to specific missions. The concept could be considered as an intermediate solution between the large monolithic structure, heavy and expensive to realize, but easy to control, and the formations of satellites, where all system members are completely free and should manoeuvre in order to acquire a desired configuration. Instead, the advantage of having a “hard-but-light” link among the different grids lays in the partition of the tasks among system components and in a possible overall reduction of the control system complexity and cost.Unfortunately, there is no stable configuration for an orbiting, two-dimensional web made by light, flexible tethers which cannot support compression forces. A possible solution is to make use of centrifugal forces to pull the net, with a reduced number of simple thrusters located at the tips of the tethers to initially acquire the required spin.In this paper a dynamic analysis of a simplified rotating web is performed, in order to evaluate the spinning velocity able to satisfy the requirement for the stability of the system. The model adopted overlaps simpler elements, each of them given by a tether (made up of a number of linear finite elements) connecting two extreme bodies accommodating the spinning thrusters. The combination of these “diameter-like” elements provides the web, shaped according to the specific requirements. The net is primarily considered as subjected to Keplerian attraction and J2 and drag perturbations only, but its behaviour under thermal inputs is also investigated.


    Zugriff

    Zugriff prüfen

    Verfügbarkeit in meiner Bibliothek prüfen

    Bestellung bei Subito €


    Exportieren, teilen und zitieren



    Titel :

    Space webs based on rotating tethered formations


    Beteiligte:

    Erschienen in:

    Acta Astronautica ; 65 , 1-2 ; 131-145


    Erscheinungsdatum :

    2009-01-27


    Format / Umfang :

    15 pages




    Medientyp :

    Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)


    Format :

    Elektronische Ressource


    Sprache :

    Englisch



    Space webs based on rotating tethered formations

    Palmerini, Giovanni B. | Online Contents | 2009


    Space Webs based on Rotating Tethered Formations

    Palmerini, Giovanni B. / Sgubini, Silvano / Sabatini, Marco | AIAA | 2006


    Space webs based on rotating tethered formations

    Palmerini, Giovanni B. | Online Contents | 2009