Charged-spacecraft formation: Manifolds, deployment and reconfiguration

Spacecraft formation maintenance and reconfiguration play an important role in some space mission, such as high accurate earth observation and astronomy. Coulomb thrust is superior to the traditional conventional chemical and electronic thrust in the proximate-formation control due to its fast throttling, nearly propellantless features and no thruster plume impingement. In this paper, we introduce a novel configuration of Coulomb formation, and use its complicated dynamic properties to design, maintain and reconstruct formation trajectories. Then invariant manifold theory is employed to design the transfer trajectory between different Coulomb formation with the supplement of inertial chemical thrust. Finally, possibly discontinuous patching manifolds are matched by inertial thrust, and Particle Swarm Optimization method is used to obtain the transfer trajectory with the lowest energy consumption. Simulation results demonstrate that the phase space structure of Coulomb formation is so complicated that there exist a number of paths along manifolds for transfers between different formations. Besides, deputies also can be deployed from the chief or took back to it, applying a hybrid control strategy with Coulomb and chemical thrust.