Robust microvibration mitigation and pointing performance analysis for high stability spacecraft

Summary This paper deals with the development of a mixed active‐passive microvibration mitigation solution capable of attenuating the transmitted vibrations generated by reaction wheels to a satellite structure. A dedicated simulation environment, provided by the European Space Agency and Airbus Defence and Space industries, serves as a support for testing the proposed solution at satellite level. This paper covers modeling, control system design, and worst‐case analysis for a typical satellite observation mission that requires high pointing stability. Combined with a novel disturbance model for the reaction wheel perturbations, the pointing performance and stability requirements are reformulated as bounds on the worst‐case system gains. Subsequently, the active microvibration controller is tuned to manage the conflicting design goals and optimize different trade‐offs between robustness and performance. Finally, robust stability margins and worst‐case performance bounds with respect to various system uncertainties, time‐varying reaction wheel spin rates, actuator saturation, and time delays are obtained using the structured singular value, integral quadratic constraints, and time‐domain nonlinear simulations.