Spacecraft Attitude Stabilization with Piecewise-constant Magnetic Dipole Moment
It addresses a practical implementation issue in magnetic attitude control for spacecraft engineers.
This paper presents attitude stabilization laws for spacecraft using only magnetic actuators that account for the constraint of piecewise-constant magnetic dipole moment, enabling systematic selection of the sampling period.
In actual implementations of magnetic control laws for spacecraft attitude stabilization, the time in which Earth magnetic field is measured must be separated from the time in which magnetic dipole moment is generated. The latter separation translates into the constraint of being able to genere only piecewise-constant magnetic dipole moment. In this work we present attitude stabilization laws using only magnetic actuators that take into account of the latter aspect. Both a state feedback and an output feedback are presented, and it is shown that the proposed design allows for a systematic selection of the sampling period.