Cooperative Circumnavigation of a Host Spacecraft by Multiple Microsatellites

摘要

This paper addresses the trajectory analysis, mission design, and control law for multiple microsatellites to cooperatively circumnavigate a host spacecraft. The cooperative circumnavigation (CCN) problem is first defined to drive a group of microsatellites to a predefined planar ellipse concerning a host spacecraft while maintaining a geometric formation configuration. Nest, a CCN control law is proposed, where the artificial potential functions and the affine Laplacian matrix are applied to fulfill the requirements of a CCN mission. Finally, simulation results are given to show the feasibility of this approach.