On the dynamics of spinning tethered spacecraft- what you really need to know

摘要

It is clear from the flight of the Canadian OEDIPUS - A mission, which was the first to involve a spinning tether, that the spin of the tether is an important factor that must be included in the modeling. This is particularly true for a wire-like tether that possesses a finite bending stiffness. But a spining tether is not a feature considered in high-fidelity models of a space tether system that have been developed in support of the various Shuttle-based and Space Station-based tether applications missions flown to-date. In this work, it is shown that subtle effects of the tether root bending can significantly affect the dynamics of a spinning tethered spacecraft, particularly at high spinrates. Using our model, we showed that these effects led to the dynamics anomaly observed in the OEDIPUS-A mission when the aft payload exhibited an unexpectedly rapid and large divergence of the coning angle.