Magnetic Detumbling of a Rigid Spacecraft

In this paper, a control law that detumbles a spacecraft with magnetic actuators only is developed. A rigorous mathematical proof of global asymptotic convergence from arbitrary initial tumbling conditions to zero angular velocity in a time-varying magnetic field is derived. Furthermore, a simple criterion for determining a reasonable value of the control gain is developed. The selected gain results in a quasi-minimum time detumbling for different initial conditions, in the presence of magnetic coil saturation. Performance of the proposed detumbling control law is demonstrated by numerical simulations on a large set of test cases using a Monte Carlo approach.