Electrostatic perturbations can have significant effects during terminal proximity operations in high Earth orbits, with torque levels exceeding during severe charging events. These torques can impart rotational rates to uncontrolled bodies, such as debris or servicing clients, during rendezvous and proximity operations. A suboptimal, but deterministic and computationally efficient, sampling-based method is presented here to minimize the impact of these torques during rendezvous, combining prior innovations in rapidly computing the electrostatic torque between bodies and in determining the electrostatic potential on objects remotely. This method is applied to a simulated servicing scenario, and found to reduce the accumulated rotational rates of the target by over 50%, yielding significant improvements in control effort, and potential improvements in safety. This iterative method is compared to an optimized strategy to minimize final rotational rate of a target, using a pseudospectral collocation-based approach. The globally optimized approach requires a priori knowledge of both spacecraft potentials throughout the approach, which limits its applicability in practice, but was found to be robust to moderate misestimates in potentials.
Constrained Guidance for Spacecraft Proximity Operations Under Electrostatic Perturbations
Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets ; 59 , 4 ; 1304-1316
2022-03-22
13 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Designing Continuously Constrained Spacecraft Relative Trajectories for Proximity Operations
Online Contents | 2015
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