Tension Control Law for Three-Dimensional Deployment of a Geostationary Space Solar Power Station

Abstract

To collect solar energy in outer space, Tethered Collecting Solar Power Satellite Systems have been proposed by several authors in the last years. A geostationary orbit would be the best location for a space-based solar power. However, a geostationary satellite occupies a single ring in the equatorial plane of the Earth. For this reason, out-of-plane configurations for solar panel systems have been studied by various authors to increase the number of slots over a particular longitude. In this paper, we assume a two-body tethered satellite system, where the microwave transmitting satellite is placed on a geostationary orbit and the tethered solar panel is deployed from the microwave transmitter. A tension control law is derived in conjunction with thruster forces by linearization of the dynamics of the tethered satellite system around an out-of-plane configuration. The stability analysis carried out in this paper shows that the linear motion is asymptotically stable. Results of numerical simulation show that the linear control strategy performs well for the nonlinear system, so that the solar panel achieves a nonplanar configuration.