Drag sail attitude tracking via nonlinear control

A drag sail is a propellantless device suitable for passive deorbiting of satellites after their end-of-life. It exploits atmospheric drag to gradually reduce the kinetic energy of the decommissioned satellite and cause it to lose altitude over time. It is well known that the braking effect of the atmosphere is greater the surface exposed to the flow of the atmospheric particles relative to the satellite. For this reason, a drag sail is essentially a large and lightweight membrane, which is deployed by the satellite when it is to begin orbital decay. For given environmental/initial conditions and inertial characteristics of the deployed system, the braking effect of a drag sail is more intense if its perpendicular axis is constantly aligned with the direction of the relative particle flow. For this purpose, a sliding mode control strategy is adopted. The reference to follow is obtained by propagating the spacecraft orbital dynamics along with its attitude dynamics. Various orbital perturbations and the disturbance torque due to atmospheric drag are implemented in the numerical code to verify the robustness of the proposed control law. It is also assumed that the spacecraft control torque vector is bounded in magnitude and always belongs to the plane of the braking device. The results show that the proposed strategy is effective in accurately tracking the reference attitude and that it is robust, being able to track a reference that varies unpredictably due to both orbital and attitude perturbations. • The paper analyzes the active attitude control problem of a drag sail. • The reference to follow is obtained by propagating the perturbed orbital dynamics. • A sliding mode control law is proposed to perform the attitude adjustments. • The control law is designed by imposing a limit on the magnitude of the input signal. • Numerical simulations indicate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.