Study of transfer trajectory guidance for electric sail

The trajectories of electric sail(ES) in space are seriously influenced by the solar wind due to the special working mechanism of ES. In this paper, a guidance law fit for ES is presented, by changing the potential of wires, only adjust the magnitude of the acceleration to track the reference trajectory. We firstly linearize the ES motion equation about the reference trajectory, then use the LQR optimal control algorithm to synthesize the tracking controller. To model the solar wind environment, we use the observation dates from national space science date center. The simulation in the Matlab under different solar wind environment, show that the guidance law presented in this paper is effective and can track the reference trajectory well, which is also robust to the various solar wind environment.