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Summary This paper deals with the development of a mixed active‐passive microvibration mitigation solution capable of attenuating the transmitted vibrations generated by reaction wheels to a satellite structure. A dedicated simulation environment, provided by the European Space Agency and Airbus Defence and Space industries, serves as a support for testing the proposed solution at satellite level. This paper covers modeling, control system design, and worst‐case analysis for a typical satellite observation mission that requires high pointing stability. Combined with a novel disturbance model for the reaction wheel perturbations, the pointing performance and stability requirements are reformulated as bounds on the worst‐case L2 system gains. Subsequently, the active microvibration controller is tuned to manage the conflicting design goals and optimize different trade‐offs between robustness and performance. Finally, robust stability margins and worst‐case performance bounds with respect to various system uncertainties, time‐varying reaction wheel spin rates, actuator saturation, and time delays are obtained using the structured singular value, integral quadratic constraints, and time‐domain nonlinear simulations.

Modern space observation missions demand stringent pointing requirements that motivated a significant amount of research on the topic of microvibration isolation and line-of-sight stabilization systems. While disturbances can be reduced by mounting some of the noisy equipment on various isolation platforms, residual vibrations can still propagate through and be amplified by the flexible structure of the spacecraft. In order to alleviate these issues, the line-of-sight must also be actively controlled at the payload level. However, such systems typically have to rely solely on low frequency sensors based on image processing algorithms. The goal of this paper is to present a model-based control methodology that can increase the bandwidth of such systems by making use of additional rate sensors mounted on the main disturbance elements impacting the optical path. Following a comprehensive model identification and uncertainty quantification part, the robust control strategy is designed to account for plant uncertainty and provide formal worst-case performance guarantees. Excellent agreement between theoretical prediction and experimental results are obtained on a test bench developed at the European Space Agency.

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