CONTROLLABILITY ANALYSIS OF PROPELLANT-FREE SATELLITE FORMATION FLIGHT

This paper proposes the controllability analysis of relative motion using different configurations for hybrid control actions of space environmental forces. It tends to present a minimal configuration for the missions exploiting these forces. It illustrates the constraints in each space environmental force and analyzes the integration between these forces to achieve full controllability of the satellite formation flight for near-circular low earth orbits with different orbit configurations. The paper implements a Kalman decomposition approach to decompose the system into controllable and uncontrollable subspaces for linear time invariant control actions. Numerical simulations are investigated to study the controllability analysis for nonlinear models and substantiate the success of the controllability study for all hybrid control actions with different orbit configurations.