Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
The two philosophies for the attitude control of flexible space vehicles that appear practicable are: firstly, the complete control of all the plant states, in the sense that all states tend to some bounded value as time tends to infinity; and secondly, to control the rigid body to lie within some bounded region and allow the vibrations within the structure to behave in an uncontrolled manner. If the former strategy is implemented, not only is the attitude of some part of the structure, for example a radio antenna, controlled to lie within some bounded region, but the modes of structural vibration are also explicitly controlled. The second method requires less state information than the first and is the less complex of the two.