ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

Spinning spacecraft with long wire probes for scientific measurements are susceptible to oscillations in the wires, which compromise the signals from the sensors. Past GNC solutions rely on passive damping of wire boom oscillations, however in slow spinning spacecraft this significantly limits the science availability due to long settling times. It is the aim of this paper to present the efforts made towards the design and demonstration of an active damping solution relying on robust control and advanced guidance techniques. The use case under investigation is a spacecraft spinning at 12 ?/s with 50 m long radial wire booms and is based on the THOR mission, a previous ESA medium-size mission candidate. The process used to derive the GNC solution is demonstrated both in an accurate simulation environment and by means of experimental tests.