Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Stationkeeping Of An L₂ Libration Point Satellite With Θ-D Technique, Ming Xin, S. N. Balakrishnan, Henry J. Pernicka, Michael W. Dancer

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A new method for L₂ libration-point orbit stationkeeping is proposed in this paper using continuous thrust. The circular restricted three-body problem with Sun and Earth as the two primaries is considered. The unstable orbit about the L₂ libration-point requires stationkeeping maneuvers to maintain the nominal path. In this study, an approach, called the "θ-D technique," based on optimal control theory gives a closed-form suboptimal feedback solution to solve this nonlinear control problem. In this approach the Hamiltonian-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation is solved approximately by adding some perturbations to the cost function. The controller is designed such that the actual …