A hybrid formulation for modelling multibody spacecraft

In order to simulate the behavior of a space multibody system, the paper shows the possibility of shifting from a Newton Euler (NE) multibody approach to Lagrange Euler (LE) like formulation of equations of motion. The NE is convenient to understand and to write down the mechanics equations of the system, but the EL based equations of motion show a minimal mathematical complexity and a minimum number of equations in a minimum number of variables. The proposed procedure also allows to swiftly turn back to the NE formulation to calculate the reaction forces and torques among the bodies. The overall revised hybrid formulation, built by mixing both NE and EL approaches, is applied for simulating the deploying phase of spacecraft solar panels.