Reconfiguration of spacecraft formations in the vicinity of libration points

Abstract

Formation °ying is an important concept demanding reliable and accurate techniques for the recon¯gura- tion or the deployment of the spacecraft. This paper is a contribution to these set of techniques considering a ¯nite element approach. The formulation allows to compute proximity maneuvers for the spacecraft and, at the same time, to incorporate optimal control techniques which include collision avoidance or many other types of constraints. The computations have been carried out about libration point orbits of the Sun-Earth system and using linearized equations about a nonlinear nominal base orbit. The trajectories obtained for this model have been corrected considering a full nonlinear model (JPL-ephemeris). Also random errors have been added to the nominal recon¯guration maneuvers to simulate small thrust errors. The presented methodology proves to be robust in both the computation of the nominal recon¯guration maneuvers and in the correction of the perturbations.