Distributed Control of Spinning Flexible Spacecraft

A unified treatment of modal control of spinning flexible spacecraft is presented. The equations of motion of the spacecraft are hybrid, i.e., they consist of ordinary differential equations for the rotational motion and partial differential equations for the elastic motion. Problems involving control of distributed-p arameter systems are generally discretized and the actual control is implemented on the discrete systems. An efficient method for control of linear gyroscopic systems is via model synthesis. There remains, however, the question as to how modal control of discrete systems is related to the control of the actual distributed-parameter systems. It is the object of this paper to provide the information concerning the spatial distribution of the sensors and actuators and to relate this information to the discrete modal control.