Optimal control of a solar sail
Résumé
Optimal control of a solar sail orbiting around a fixed center of mass is considered. The sail is modelled as a plane surface with two sides having similar optical prop- erties. The control is assumed to be the attitude of the sail and is so represented as an element of the projective plane. Mapping this plane to compute the actual force generated by a given attitude results in a generally non-convex set of admissible con- trol values. A suitable convex relaxation is introduced to study the optimality system associated with maximising the change of the sail orbital parameters in a given di- rection along one orbit. Building on previous works,1,2,3 a refined analysis of the control structure is given. In order to compute effective solutions, a multiple shooting approach is retained that is well suited for systems with a sequence of switchings be- tween various control subarcs. Three issues are addressed: initialisation of shooting by means a tailored SDP relaxation that takes advantage of good convergence prop- erties of modern convex optimisation algorithms; changes in the control structure that are accommodated by coupling shooting with differential continuation; implicit character of the Hamiltonian maximisation when using Pontrjagin maximum princi- ple that is taken care of by incorporating the associated equation for the dynamical feedback into the shooting procedure. The method is illustrated on an example from JPL for which the sail inclination is optimally changed over one orbital period.
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