MIGRATION AND THE STATIC STABILITY OF SPINNING SPACECRAFT

A spin-stabilized spacecraft carrying liquid fuel in communicating res ervoirs, such as METEOSAT Second Generation (MSG), may have its fueled inertia properties significantly influenced by the phenomenon of inte r-reservoir liquid migration driven by centrifugal forces. Previous au thors have exposed this phenomenon in terms of a Wobble Amplification Factor (WAF). We generalize this description to that of a Wobble Ampli fication Tensor (WAT) and we consider the effect of reservoir alignmen t errors. Most importantly, we demonstrate the importance of modeling the migration of the total center of mass in the body-fixed frame, an effect omitted in the previously published works.