Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Fuel Equalized Retargeting For Separated Spacecraft Interferometry, Timothy Mclain, Randal W. Beard, Fred Y. Hadaegh
Fuel Equalized Retargeting For Separated Spacecraft Interferometry, Timothy Mclain, Randal W. Beard, Fred Y. Hadaegh
Faculty Publications
Motivated by NASA's proposed Deep Space 3 interferometer mission, the paper considers the problem of reorienting a constellation of spacecraft such that the total fuel distributed across the constellation is both conserved and expended uniformly. The spacecraft constellation is controlled to reorient as if it were a rigid body. Two approaches to fuel equalization are investigated. The first approach picks a point of rotation a priori that optimizes an objective function that trades off minimum-fuel maneuvers and maneuvers that equalize the fuel. Since the point of rotation is selected a priori and is fixed during the rotation, this approach is …