Spacecraft Line of Sight Maneuver Control Using Skew-arrayed Two Single-Gimbal Control Moment Gyros

Abstract

This paper considers line-of-sight (LOS) maneuver control of an underactuated spacecraft equipped with two skewed singlegimbal control moment gyros. To describe the spacecraft attitude, two parameters referred to as the W-Z parameters are used, the first of which represents the angle between the target LOS and the LOS of the mission-equipment, and the second of which represents the angle around the LOS. In order to stabilize the mission-equipment LOS to the target LOS, a two-step attitude control procedure is considered, which consists of feedforward control combined with feedback control based on a backstepping control method using the W-Z parameters. A numerical simulation is carried out to validate the proposed control procedure.