Publication Date:
2019-07-13
Description:
The present work assesses the increase in flight time and fuel consumption due to introducing attitude constraints on both the thrust vector and the plane of the solar cell arrays on geocentrically orbiting spacecraft. A modified version of the SECKSPOT computer program calculates nearly time-optimal trajectories for the constrained case of zero pitch and roll. Unconstrained cases are generated with the SECKSPOT code. It is concluded that with a pitch constraint but without a roll constraint, power would not be a function of thrust direction, and so the time-optimal thruster direction would be along the projection of the primer vector in the plane normal to the radius vector. The roll constraint would cause power to become a function of thrust angle and sun angle. For certain sun angles the locus of the ratio of power to maximum power is concave and thus there may be jumps in the control angle. Comparisons are made for a SERT-C type mission between constrained and unconstrained cases in an inverse square gravity field.
Keywords:
SPACECRAFT DESIGN, TESTING AND PERFORMANCE
Type:
AIAA PAPER 75-350
,
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Electric Propulsion Conference; Mar 19, 1975 - Mar 21, 1975; New Orleans, LA
Format:
text
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