Impulsive control for angular momentum management of tumbling spacecraft

We discuss an angular momentum control of a tumbling spacecraft. The proposed control method is to apply an impulse by a space robot arm, to measure and control the relative position and attitude between the target spacecraft, and then to apply another impulse until the rotational motion of the target spacecraft is well damped. A discrete controller is designed using the simplified equations of rotational motion through appropriate coordinate transformation. The stationary response under contact model uncertainty is investigated and stability condition is analytically derived. Numerical simulations are given to validate the proposed approach.