Problems and methods in the theory of spaceborne terminal control systems

Some of the characteristic problems which distinguish terminal control problems involving moving objects, such as spacecraft performing various maneuvers, from terminal control problems with stationary objects are discussed, and a general statement of the synthesis problem for spaceborne terminal control systems is given. The case of synthesis of sampled-data systems is considered in particular, and an approach based on limiting the complexity of the control system is adopted. This is done by imposing constraints on the capacity of the operative memory of the controller, on the capacity of the permanent memory, and on the form of the operations realizable by the controller. The problem of estimating the limiting accuracy of terminal control systems is considered. An approach to the construction of spaceborne terminal control systems is proposed for cases when only a part of the control object's statistical characteristics is known.