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Optimal Propellant-less Control of a Solar Sail
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Version 1
: Received: 1 October 2022 / Approved: 3 October 2022 / Online: 3 October 2022 (12:13:19 CEST)
How to cite: Pittella, A.; Sands, T. Optimal Propellant-less Control of a Solar Sail. Preprints 2022, 2022100007. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202210.0007.v1 Pittella, A.; Sands, T. Optimal Propellant-less Control of a Solar Sail. Preprints 2022, 2022100007. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202210.0007.v1
Abstract
: Solar sails use radiation from the sun to generate thrust without any fuel or propellant. Since this is a form of propulsion that has theoretically infinite use, we would like to test its capability on long-term missions by simulating a spacecraft equipped with solar sails to the Sun-Earth L5 Lagrange point. To control the sail angle, which is the main form of control we have over the sail’s performance, we will devise a form of optimal control based on Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle. Simulating the dynamics in MATLAB SIMULINK, we find that such a control method relies on iterating over initial conditions for the co-states to find the necessary parameters for the trajectory to reach the desired point. Therefore, an autonomous control scheme that uses this form of optimal control will need a way to numerically find said initial conditions in order to find the control angle needed at any point in time, which may be computationally intensive.
Keywords
optimal control; solar sails; Lagrange points; Pontryagin’s Principle
Subject
Engineering, Aerospace Engineering
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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