Liapunov stability analysis of spinning flexible spacecraft

Abstract

In this section the results of a recent study reported in Ref. 19 are briefly reviewed. The objective of the paper is a set of stability criteria for a spacecraft characterized as a rigid body having attached a flexible appendage idealized as a collection of elastically interconnected particles. The appendage is permitted in the paper to be configured in a general fashion, but the special case of the planar appendage shown in Fig. 16 is adopted in order to obtain explicit closed form stability criteria without the aid of computer simulation. The well Down stability procedures offered by Liapunov’s direct (second) method are invoked in the paper. Among the many theorems on stability and instability of the class developed by Liapunov two have direct relevance to the development. Described in detail by Pringle, [20] the theorems of interest are par aphrased below.