Date of Award

January 2015

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics

Department

Aeronautics and Astronautics

First Advisor

Kathleen C Howell

Committee Member 1

Martin Corless

Committee Member 2

James Longuski

Abstract

Libration point orbits are, in general, inherently unstable. Without the presence of corrective maneuvers a spacecraft will diverge from the vicinity of such trajectories. In this research effort, two orbital maintenance control strategies are studied: the impulsive Floquet Mode (FM) controller and the continuous Hamiltonian Structure-Preserving (HSP) controller. These two controllers are further developed to incorporate real-world mission design constraints. The FM controller is modified to accommodate feasible maneuver directions that are constrained to a plane or a line. This controller is shown to be applicable for orbital station-keeping of spin stabilized spacecraft that are only equipped with either tangential thrusters or axial thrusters. The HSP controller is extended for application to general three-dimensional hyperbolic libration point orbits, and then discretized to account for the minimum time required for orbit determination and/or scientific operations. Both controllers are applied to an unstable 𝐿1 halo orbit in the Sun-Earth/Moon system. The performances of these controllers are examined under the impacts of the spacecraft’s operation errors and mission design constraints. Simulation results suggest that the FM controller is capable of maintaining the motion of the spacecraft in the vicinity of the desired reference trajectory for the duration of the simulation, while satisfying all mission design constraints. The discrete-time MHSP controller proves to be able to improve the stability of the nominal trajectory by reducing the value of the unstable Poincare exponent of the reference orbit.

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