Passive stability design for the solar sail on displaced orbits

This paper investigates the passive stability design of a sailcraft on a displaced orbit with the orbit and attitude considered simultaneously. The objective is to stabilize the orbit-attitude coupled system passively by designing the sailcraft parameters. The design results show that the system can be marginally stable with passive control. First, the criteria for the passive stability of the sailcraft are given, and the coupled equations of motion are obtained. Then, the whole design problem is converted into an optimization problem by converting the design parameters into the optimization parameters, the static requirements of the stability criteria into constraints, and the dynamical requirements into the optimization function. Finally, an example of the optimal design is given. The simulation results under different initial conditions show that the sailcraft is marginally stable on the orbit