Abstract The Cislunar Suspension Tether is a kind of ultra-long tether anchored to the Moon's surface and extending to the Earth's vicinity, looks like hanging from the Moon above the Earth. The tether is expected to be used for transportation between the Earth and Moon. The feasibility of constructing such a long tether in the cislunar space far away from the Earth has been validated by studying the statics of the tether with distributed mass by the current authors. In addition, dynamics of such tethered system with various initial conditions and small perturbations should be investigated. In this paper, the main dynamic characteristics of the tether are analyzed using the multi-body dynamic model. In the framework of elliptic Earth-Moon restricted three-body system, the tethered system with distributed mass is discretized using lumped masses connected by massless viscoelastic springs. The dynamic equations of the space tethered system are derived using the Lagrange method after obtaining the global potential and kinetic energies of the system. The tethered system is regarded as a Rooted-Tree System in the Earth-Moon restricted three-body system since the Moon with known motion is taken as the root of the system. The dynamic responses of each lumped mass are examined and the springs merely experiencing tensile forces rather than compressional forces are considered. The in-plane libration and elongation of the tether for the circular and elliptic cases with various initial (position and velocity) conditions are explored. Various dynamic characteristics of the tethered system influenced by the eccentricity and initial conditions are addressed and the results indicate that the extremely long lunar anchored tethered system is feasible as long as the initial conditions of the system fall into proper ranges. Some other conclusions are also presented based on the numerical experiments.
Highlights Simulation of ultra-long tether swings in the Earth-Moon restricted three-body system. A Rooted-Tree System and its dynamic equations derived using the Euler-Lagrange equation method. Various dynamic characteristics of the CST system influenced by the eccentricity and initial conditions. The CST can maintain stable motion with the Moon by proper condition, but collapse or chaos by bad situation.
Dynamic analysis of cislunar suspension tether swings
Acta Astronautica ; 216 ; 350-369
2024-01-06
20 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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