Kinetic isolation tether experiment

Progress was made on the analysis of tether damping and on experimentation of the control system on the laboratory simulator. The damping analysis considers the dynamics of a long tether connecting two spacecraft in Earth orbit, one of the spacecraft having dominant mass. In particular, it considers the material damping of the tether. The results show that, with properly chosen tether material and braiding structure, longitudinal vibration of the tethered system is well damped. A particularly effective method of implementing attitude control for tethered satellites is to use the tether tension force to generate control torques by moving the tether attach point relative to the satellite center of mass. A scaled, one dimensional laboratory simulation of the KITE mission was built and preliminary experiments of the proposed attitude control system were performed. The simulator was built to verify theoretical predictions of attitude controllability, and to investigate the technological requirements in order to implement this concept. A detailed description of the laboratory apparatus is provided, and in addition, the results of the preliminary experiments are presented and discussed.