Solar sail chaotic pitch dynamics and its control in Earth orbits

The attitude dynamics and control for solar sail orbiting a celestial body (e.g., the Earth) are critical for the space missions. In the paper, the pitch dynamics is addressed by considering the torques by the center-of-mass and center-of-pressure offset, the gravity gradient, the internal damping and the control vane. The chaotic pitch motion is analytically detected for the sailcraft in the circular and elliptical orbits with small eccentricities using the Melnikov’s method. The validity of the Melnikov method is numerically verified by checking the Poincare surface of section and the power spectral density. The stability criterion method with some improvements is utilized to stabilize the chaotic pitch motion onto the reference unstable periodic motion embedded in the chaotic attractor. The reference unstable periodic motion is obtained based on the calculation of the close return pairs. The small control input torques and the stabilization effects are presented, and the advantages of the modified stabilization method are clarified based on the numerical simulations.