STRATEGY FOR THE PASSIVE MANEUVERING OF TETHER-CONNECTED SYSTEMS

New strategies for the deployment and the retrieval phases for tether- connected systems, such as the tethered satellite system, are presente d, The passive strategy, which is similar in spirit to that of the ide a of Hohmann transfer, takes advantage of the gravitational field, For the deployment, appropriate circular, elliptic, or hyperbolic orbits are designed for the spacecraft and the payload, respectively, The tet her keeps slack during the process until being pulled taut at the fina l stage. Analogous strategies can be designed for the retrieval phase. Conditions on the designed transfer orbits are derived from the orbit al equations and Kepler's equation. Numerical results show that such m ethodologies have potential applications.