Attitude Stability of a Spacecraft with Slosh Mass Subject to Parametric Excitation

The attitude motion of a spin-stabilized, upper-stage spacecraft is investigated based on a two-body model, consisting of a symmetric body, representing the spacecraft, and a spherical pendulum, representing the liquid slag pool entrapped in the aft section of the rocket motor. Exact time-varying nonlinear equations are derived and used to eliminate the drawbacks of conventional linear models. To study the stability of the spacecraft's attitude motion, both the spacecraft and pendulum are assumed to be in states of steady spin about the symmetry axis of the spacecraft and the coupled time-varying nonlinear equation of the pendulum is simplified. A quasi-stationary solution to that equation and approximate resonance conditions are determined in terms of the system parameters. The analysis shows that the pendulum is subject to a combination of parametric and external-type excitation by the main body and that energy from the excited pendulum is fed into the main body to develop the coning instability. In this paper, numerical examples are presented to explain the mechanism of the coning angle growth and how angular momenta and disturbance moments are generated