Paper published on IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems

Our recent work titled “Q-Law Control with Sun-Angle Constraint for Solar Electric Propulsion” has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. 

In this paper, we derive analytic expressions for a Q-Law-based low-thrust control for solar electric propelled spacecraft, subject to a constraint on the angle between the incoming sunlight and a spacecraft’s solar panels to ensure that power generation is sufficient to produce thrust. The proposed feedback control can successfully compute transfers minimizing the time of flight or a performance index that considers both the time of flight and the mass consumed.

The early access version is available here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10588968