High performance two degrees of freedom attitude control for solar sails

The purpose of this paper is to present a high performance solar sail attitude controller which uses ballast masses moving inside the sail’s booms as actuators and to demonstrate its ability of performing time efficient reorientation maneuvers. The proposed controller consists of a combination of a feedforward and a feedback controller, which takes advantage of the feedforward’s fast response and the feedback’s ability of responding to unpredicted disturbances. The feedforward controller considers the attitude dynamics of the sailcraft as well as the disturbance torque due to the center of pressure offset to the center of mass of the sailcraft. Additional disturbance torques, like those coming from the environment or from asymmetry of the spacecraft structure, are then handled by the feedback controller. Simulation performance results are finally compared against results available in the literature.