Sensitivity analysis of bare-wire space tether systems

Hypergeometric series solutions are presented for the electrodynamic response of bare-wire tether systems, and are used to generate closed-form expressions for the sensitivity coefficients in the generator configuration. For the thruster configuration, the governing equations are in the form of three simultaneous differential equations, which do not allow closed-form solutions for the sensitivity coefficients to be generated, and therefore numerical solutions for the sensitivity coefficients are presented.