Modeling and attitude control for solar sail based on gimbal boom

Solar sail is a new type of spacecraft with propellantless propulsion, whose flight greatly depends on its attitude. The purpose of this paper is to present an attitude control strategy for solar sail using a gimbal boom as actuator. Focusing on the large scale but light weight flexible sail structure, a reduced rigid-flexible coupling model is established including the dynamics of actuator. Based on the proposed nonlinear model, a LQR control law is designed to accomplish a pitch axis reorientation control with a permitted control torque which is limited to actuator. In addition, to deal with the vibrations induced by attitude maneuver, a path planning technique is proposed combined with the feedback control law to improve the performance of the control system. The numerical simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.