Speaker
Mr
Andrea Colagrossi
(Politecnico di Milano)
Description
The idea of building a space station in the vicinity of the Moon as a gateway for future human exploration of the Solar System is being investigated since many years, and recently the attention of scientific community has become even more intense. The natural location for a space system of this kind is about one of the Earth-Moon libration points, in particular EML1 or EML2. Therefore, the entire analysis has to take into account the non-Keplerian dynamics that regulates the orbital motion in these environments.
At the current level of study, the final configuration of the entire system is still to be defined. However, it is already clear that in order to assemble the structure several rendezvous and docking activities will be carried out, many of which to be completely automated. In addition, numerous proximity manoeuvres will be held along all the nominal lifetime of the space infrastructure.
In non-Keplerian orbits the motion is completely different from the one in LEO, since the effects of three-body problem are not negligible, and various problems still deserve particular attention despite the knowledge about autonomous approaching operations in space, acquired with the experience of the International Space Station.
In this paper, the dynamics of very large space structures in non-Keplerian orbits is analysed, taking into account the flexibility of the system and the coupling effects between the modes of the structure and those related with the orbital motion. The results are then exploited to have a sensitivity analysis about the different families of non-Keplerian orbits as a function of the possible configurations of the space station with respect to the numerous rendezvous and docking manoeuvres to be facilitated: the dynamical stability of the system can be evaluated and assessed with respect to safe rendezvous and docking manoeuvres design between robotic vehicles and orbiting infrastructure.
A Multi-Body approach is here preferred, but the flexibility of the system is included both with a lumped parameters and with a distributed parameters technique. The results obtained with the two different approaches are compared, analysing the precision of the results and the computational time that is required to perform the computations. The configuration and the parameters of the large space structures are fully parametrized and the model is maintained as generic as possible, in a way to delineate a global scenario of the mission. However, the developed model can be tuned and updated according to the information that will be available in the future, when the system will be defined with a higher level of precision.
The results are critically presented with respect to the proximity manoeuvring complexity and required resource budgets for some reference scenarios.
| Applicant type | First author |
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Primary author
Mr
Andrea Colagrossi
(Politecnico di Milano)
Co-author
Prof.
Michelle Lavagna
(Politecnico di Milano)
