Virtual Structure Based Attitude Control of Tether-Controlled Spinning Solar Sail Considering Membrane Vibration

The Laboratory for Space Systems (LSS) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology has proposed a tether-controlled spinning solar sail. Three satellites at each corner of membrane are connected by tether and control the formation and attitude by controlling the lengths of the tethers. In this paper, the attitude maneuver by generating offset between center of mass (C.M.) and center of pressure (C.P.) is proposed and investigated by means of numerical simulation. Then the Virtual Structure method is applied to the control of attitude maneuver methodology. The results show that the Virtual Structure method improves the stability of the membrane and realizes sufficient attitude maneuver performance.