Bodies with the nonspherical tensor of inertia (TOI) exhibit a variety of rotational motion patterns, including chaotic motion, stable periodic (quasi-periodic) rotation, unstable rotation around the direction close to the body's second principal axis, featuring a well-known tennis-racket (also known as Garriott-Dzhanibekov ) effect – series of seemingly spontaneous 180 degrees flips. These patterns are even more complex if the body's TOI is changing with time. Changing a body's TOI has been discussed recently as a tool to perform controllable Garriott-Dzhanibekov flips and similar maneuvers. In this work, the optimal control of the TOI of the body (spacecraft, or any other device that admits free rotation in three dimensions) is used as a means to perform desirable re-orientations of a body with respect to its angular velocity. Using the spherical TOI as the initial and final point of the maneuver, we optimize the parameters of the maneuver to achieve and stabilize the desired orientation of the body's principal axes with respect to spin angular velocity. It appears that such a procedure allows for finding arbitrarily complex maneuver trajectories of a spinning body. In particular, intermediate axis instability can be used to break the alignment of the body's principal axis and the axis of rotation. Such maneuvers do not require utilization of propellants and could be straightforwardly used for attitude control of a spin-stabilized spacecraft. The capabilities of such a method of angular maneuvering are demonstrated in numerical simulations.

中文翻译：

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通过演化惯性张量来任意控制旋转体的重新定向

具有非球面惯性张量（TOI）的物体表现出多种旋转运动模式，包括混沌运动、稳定周期（准周期）旋转、围绕接近物体第二主轴方向的不稳定旋转，其特点是著名的网球-球拍（也称为 Garriott-Dzhanibekov）效应 – 一系列看似自发的 180 度翻转。如果身体的 TOI 随时间变化，这些模式会变得更加复杂。最近，人们讨论了改变身体的 TOI 作为执行可控 Garriott-Dzhanibekov 翻转和类似动作的工具。在这项工作中，身体（航天器或任何其他允许在三个维度上自由旋转的设备）TOI 的最佳控制被用作对身体相对于其角速度执行所需的重新定向的手段。使用球形 TOI 作为机动的起点和终点，我们优化机动参数，以实现并稳定身体主轴相对于旋转角速度的所需方向。看来这样的过程可以找到旋转体的任意复杂的机动轨迹。特别是，中间轴不稳定性可用于破坏主体主轴线和旋转轴的对齐。这种机动不需要使用推进剂，可以直接用于自旋稳定航天器的姿态控制。这种角度操纵方法的能力在数值模拟中得到了证明。