Automatic Mass Balancing of Air-Bearing-Based Three-Axis Rotational Spacecraft Simulator

摘要

Air-bearing-based spacecraft simulators are widely used to develop and verify spacecraft control techniquesnrequired by modern spacecraft applications. To create a spacelike environment with ground spacecraft simulators,nthe effects of gravity should be minimized. For a spherical air-bearing system with 3 rotational degrees of freedom,nthe center of rotation of the spacecraft simulator should be exactly aligned with the center of gravity. This papernpresents the automatic mass balancing method, which compensates for the center of gravity offset from the center ofnrotation by actuating three proof masses on linear motion stages. Adaptive control of the automatic mass balancingnsystem is used while the balancing masses are actuated in real time. The proposed techniques are implemented on thenground-based three-axis spacecraft simulator for the bifocal relay mirror spacecraft.