METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR INCLINED ORBIT ATTITUDE CONTROL FOR MOMENTUM BIAS SPACECRAFT

摘要

The present invention is a method and apparatus to control a pointing trajectory of an aim point with respect to one or more targets for a momentum bias spacecraft in an orbit inclined relative to an equatorial geosynchronous orbit wherein the spacecraft is provided with an onboard computer capable of using orbit information available to the spacecraft and spacecraft hardware to move the aim point according to a predetermined tracking model which may be either time-varying or invariant. The tracking model allows the controller to remove short-term nutational and long-term orbit rate dynamical disturbances, beyond simple-order sinusoidal functions having a single frequency.