Spacecraft Formation Flying

Chapter 9

Rotation-Translation Coupling

Publisher Summary

This chapter presents a model for the kinematic coupling effect and shows that this effect is key for high-precision modeling of tight formation flying, rendezvous, and docking. The kinematically coupled relative rotational and translational motion model describes the six-degrees-of-freedom relative dynamics between two rigid-body spacecraft. This model generalizes the nonlinear relative translation models to include trajectories of points that are not located on the spacecraft centers-of-mass (CMs). Given two rigid-body spacecraft, the model presented in the chapter is formulated in a general manner that describes the motion between any two arbitrary points on the spacecraft. The relative ...