Steindl, A. (2016). Time optimal control for the deployment of a tethered satellite allowing for a massive tether. Meccanica. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11012-016-0541-9
The time optimal deployment of a satellite from a space ship is studied. In order to take the mass and lateral oscillations of the tether into account, a discretized model of the tether is build. Applying Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle a time-optimal deployment from a trivial downhanging configuration close to the space ship to another one farther away is computed. It is found, that the obtained solution displays a difficult switching pattern and during the variation of the initial length different kinds of bifurcations occur, leading to discontinuous variations of the optimal solution candidates.