A method for capturing small body in close proximity multi-body tethered spacecraft formations

This paper investigated a multi -tethered spacecraft formation encirclement capture method designed to meet the footage force requirements of small body detection missions. Herein, the task flow, method advantages, and key technologies involved in this encirclement capture method are described. The position and attitude coupling dynamic model is constructed for developing multibody tethered spacecraft to encircle small body. The relative dynamic model of the node spacecraft, which is relative to the desired coordinate system and small body, for spacecraft formation is derived using the dual quaternion theory and absolute nodal coordinate method by introducing the relative pose configuration and rope connection topology matrices. Furthermore, the transformation relationship between these two matrices enables better handling of inconvenient observation data in weak environments using equivalent replacement. Finally, numerical simulation experiments and analysis were conducted to verify the correctness of the dynamic model and the feasibility of the encirclement capture method.