SOLAR SAIL ATTITUDE CONTROL USING A COMBINATION OF A FEEDFORWARD AND A FEEDBACK CONTROLLER

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a solar sail attitude controller which uses ballast masses moving inside the sail 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 system’s fast response and the feedback’s ability of responding to unpredicted disturbances. The feedforward controller considers the attitude dynamics of the sailcraft and the disturbance torque due to the center of pressure offset to the center of mass. Additional disturbance torques, like those 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.