Mission analysis and optimal control for cislunar mission with spinning tether system in hyperbolic orbits

This paper presents a concept of using spinning tether system for interstellar mission, and designs the optimal trajectory and the controller required for the interstellar mission. The interstellar mission carried out by a two-body spinning tether system relies on the momentum-exchange techniques, which equipped with ion thrusters can greatly economize the propellant. In order to ensure that the system can achieve a state of being able to complete the mission under the given optimal conditions, an optimal trajectory is designed by using hp-adaptive pseudospectral method. Then, an adaptive robust sliding mode controller is given based on radial basis function neural network to make the system with uncertainty reach the optimal trajectory. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the optimal trajectory and the controller. •A concept to perform multiple submissions in one space mission is proposed, which explores the advantages and potential of utilizing STS for space missions.•The control problem of STS in a hyperbolic orbit is studied, and the proposed controller can be easily extended to general second-order systems.•An adaptive robust sliding mode controller based on RBFNN is designed to deal with the unknown parts of the system and disturbance.