Speaker
Prof.
Michelle Lavagna
(Politecnico di Milano)
Description
The paper presents in details the design, implementation and running of the experiment run by the PoliTethers DAERPoliMi team to verify and validate the flexible connections dynamics in the 0g relevant environment.
Space Tugs exploiting tether connection with the target must avoid effects such the bounce back and whiplash provoked by the intrinsic tether flexibility and elasticity. Therefore, well suited control laws, to be exploited in the tugs main actuators activation strategy must be synthetized and robustly verified before application.
The presented experiment allowed testing and verifying the proposed wave‐based control law to dump any unwanted and dangerous stack dynamics, leaning on the tension feedback. Interesting aspects regarding the tension modelling were detected, thanks to the microgravity environment, not identified running the functional tests on ground.
Data post‐processing and obtained results are discussed, and on going further developments and future expected testing campaigns are presented.
Primary authors
Prof.
Michelle Lavagna
(Politecnico di Milano)
Mr
Paolo Lunghi
(Politecnico di Milano - Aerospace Science and Technology Dept.)
V. Pesce
