Slew Maneuver Constraints for Agile Flexible Spacecraft

Traditional spacecraft design paradigms rely on stiff bus structures with comparatively flexible appendages. More recent trends, however, trade deployed stiffness for packaging efficiency to stow apertures with larger areas inside existing launch vehicles. By leveraging recent advances in materials and structures, these spacecraft may be up to several orders of magnitude lighter and more flexible than the current state of the art. Motivated by the goal of achieving agility despite structural flexibility, this paper proposes and verifies a quantitative method for determining structure-based performance limits for maneuvering flexible spacecraft. The results demonstrate that, contrary to common assumptions, other constraints impose more restrictive limits on maneuverability than the dynamics of the structure. In particular, it is shown that an attitude control system’s available angular momentum and torque are often significantly more limiting than the compliance of the structure. Consequently, these results suggest that there is an opportunity to design less-conservative, higher-performance space systems that can either be maneuvered faster (assuming suitable actuators are available) or built using lighter-weight, less-stiff architectures that move the structure-based performance limits closer to those of the rest of the system.