Synchronized Orbits and Oscillations for Free Altitude Control

Attitude and orbit coupling of planar helio-stable solar sails

“…A simplified version of the QRP that consists of a single triangular flat panel and an appropriately positioned payload of the spacecraft was considered in [4], and later exploited in [12] to design new periodic orbits in the circular restricted three body problem. The suggested spacecraft was shown to have undamped conservative oscillatory dynamics around the Sun-pointing direction.…”

“…Despite the contributions [3,4,10,11,12] provide satisfactory results, there is, to the authors' knowledge, a lack of understanding of 1. The attitude dynamics, especially close to the Sun-pointing attitude, and 2.…”

“…These two questions are addressed in this paper by considering a sail structure in between the single-panel considered in [4,12] and the full QRP [3,10,11] whose orbit dynamics (without any attitude control) evolves strictly on the ecliptic plane if adequate initial attitude conditions are chosen. The structure consists of two panels with variable aperture and variable position of the payload, as introduced in [20].…”