Formation flying solar-sail gravity tractors in displaced orbit for towing near-Earth asteroids

Several methods of asteroid deflection have been proposed in literature and the gravitational tractor is a new method using gravitational coupling for near-Earth object orbit modification. One weak point of gravitational tractor is that the deflection capability is limited by the mass and propellant of the spacecraft. To enhance the deflection capability, formation flying solar sail gravitational tractor is proposed and its deflection capability is compared with that of a single solar sail gravitational tractor. The results show that the orbital deflection can be greatly increased by increasing the number of the sails. The formation flying solar sail gravitational tractor requires several sails to evolve on a small displaced orbit above the asteroid. Therefore, a proper control should be applied to guarantee that the gravitational tractor is stable and free of collisions. Two control strategies are investigated in this paper: a loose formation flying realized by a simple controller with only thrust modulation and a tight formation realized by the sliding-mode controller and equilibrium shaping method. The merits of the loose and tight formations are the simplicity and robustness of their controllers, respectively.