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Chaos in a tethered satellite system induced by atmospheric drag and Earth’s oblateness

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Abstract

This paper describes the chaos behavior of an in-plane tethered satellite system induced by atmospheric drag and the Earth’s oblateness. A commonly used model, the dumbbell model, for tethered satellite systems is employed in this study. After taking the atmospheric drag and the Earth’s oblateness into account, the complicated dynamics of chaotic features are observed in the pitch motion of the dumbbell model. Afterward, the existence of the chaos is computed by transversal heteroclinic orbits, and accordingly, the parameter domain for the occurrence of chaos is obtained by the Melnikov function. Furthermore, a tether length control based on a sliding-mode controller is proposed to suppress the chaotic motion. Finally, the numerical simulations in this paper demonstrate the occurrence of the chaotic phenomenon and its control performance.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (11672125, 11902145 and 11732006), the Research Fund of State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures (NUAA, MCMS-I-0120G03), the Research Fund of State Key Laboratory of Structural Analysis for Industrial Equipment (DUT, GZ18115), and the Manned Space Flight Pre-research Project (060101).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210016, People’s Republic of China

    B. S. Yu, S. D. Xu & D. P. Jin

  2. State Key Laboratory of Structural Analysis for Industrial Equipment, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, People’s Republic of China

    B. S. Yu

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Correspondence to D. P. Jin.

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Yu, B.S., Xu, S.D. & Jin, D.P. Chaos in a tethered satellite system induced by atmospheric drag and Earth’s oblateness. Nonlinear Dyn 101, 1233–1244 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11071-020-05844-8

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