Considerations on control for a tethered satellite system through angular momentum conservation

This study deals with orbital transfer of a tethered satellite system (TSS) on orbit. Dynamics of TSS is restricted to the angular momentum conservation law of the system around a planet. This constraint is not integrable (, that is called "nonholonomic constraint"), and the final state of TSS depends on a time history of the input. While previous works for orbital transfer mainly investigated dynamics of the system for specified time profiles of the tether-length, this study aims to make tether extension profiles to achieve some specified orbit. This paper, as a preliminary study, gives a brief overview of the previous works and investigates the fundamental property of the constraint based on the angular momentum conservation. Integrability and accessibility /controllability are analyzed and also numerically verified. For simplicity, TSS is modeled to a dumbbell-type satellite in this study.