Study on Attitude and Orbit Control Strategy for Spacecraft with Solar Sails in Tandem

From the point of view of engineering feasibility, the current mainstream single-sided giant solar sail into a chain form of multiple stackable small unit sails connected by flexible axis is proposed in this paper. The proposed solar sails have no trouble problem of in-orbit deployment, and also can be connected to be a giant space solar power station. Firstly, the rigid-flexible-thermal coupling dynamical model is given. And based on it, the main influence analysis of space environment about solar pressure disturbance, gravity gradient disturbance, lunisolar gravitational perturbation, Non spherical perturbation of the Earth and thermal radiation, and the disturbance for position and attitude of the whole sail produced by rotation of unit array are performed. After that, the general strategy of and attitude of orbit control design of the whole solar sail is proposed. The strategy of attitude of control design is belong to three-level cooperative control including the position and attitude control for central rigid, flexible vibration suppression of south and north flexible axes and pointing control of unit array. The critical technology of orbit control design includes the optimal fixed-point longitude selection, the optimal area-mass ratio selection, fuel-consumption of electric propulsion for the proposed sloar sail. Finally, the simulation demonstrates that sloar sails in Tandem can perform sun-pointing and attitude maneuver requirement under the proposed strategy. The given theory and engineering researching findings in this paper can be applied to space solar power station in geosynchronous orbit by the Chinese plan.