Spacecraft Backsubstitution Dynamics with General Multibody Prescribed Subcomponents

In the early stages of spacecraft missions, emerging performance requirements must be rapidly verified through extensive simulation and subsequent analysis. With missions employing complex time-varying spacecraft structures, there is a marked need for flexible, scalable, and modular simulation software tools to model the effects of diverse types of multibody spacecraft dynamics. Prior work using the spacecraft dynamics backsubstitution method is expanded to consider a spacecraft consisting of a rigid hub and [Formula: see text] six-degree-of-freedom rigid subcomponents following hub-relative prescribed motion. Unlike the original backsubstitution formulation, the kinematics of the subcomponents are prescribed, thus reducing the number of differential equations that must be solved from [Formula: see text] to 6. Further, the new formulation permits branching and both open and closed chains in the spacecraft configuration space that were not feasible before. The solution is modular in that the dynamic impact of the subcomponents is solved generally, enabling both hub-relative translation and rotation without constraints. The Basilisk astrodynamics simulation framework is used to demonstrate an efficient, modular implementation and verify the derived dynamics. A prescribed motion solar array deployment scenario demonstrating the scalability of the derived dynamics is simulated, and the sensitivity of the hub dynamics to the deployment is investigated.