Attitude control for a full-scale flexible electric solar wind sail spacecraft on heliocentric and displaced non-Keplerian orbits

The electric solar wind sail (E-sail) spacecraft is a fuel-free propulsion system with promising potential in deep space explorations and solar activity monitoring missions. It is challenging to conduct attitude control for a full-scale flexible E-sail spacecraft due to its complex dynamical characteristics, including the spatial multi-scale, high-speed spinning, and large deformations. In this work, a double-loop attitude control strategy for the flexible E-sail spacecraft with high accuracy and efficiency is proposed. The E-sail spacecraft is firstly modeled by the referenced nodal coordinate formulation, where the rotations are described by the Lie group approach. A state-feedback controller developed from the Lyapunov stability theory is prescribed as the inner loop. The gain is obtained by solving a semidefinite programming problem with linear matrix inequality constraints, which is globally optimal and numerically reliable. A multi-variable proportional-integral-derivative controller is then introduced as the outer loop for flexibly enhancing the control performance. Several missions of the E-sail spacecraft, including attitude maneuvers on heliocentric and displaced non-Keplerian orbits, are studied to show that the desired attitude adjustments are accurately and efficiently achieved without exciting high-frequency oscillations. The double-loop control strategy has great prospects in designing and implementing orbital transformation and long-term stable Sun-orbiting missions.