Feasibility of underactuated formation reconfiguration in elliptic orbits without radial or in-track thrust is investigated in this paper. For either underactuated case, by using a linear time-varying dynamical model of spacecraft formation, controllability and feasibility analyses are conducted, based on which the preconditions on reconfigurable formations are then derived. With the inherent coupling of system dynamics, the reduced-order sliding mode control technique is employed to design a closed-loop underactuated controller for either case. To ensure the stability of the closed-loop system, the conditions imposed on the controller parameters are derived, and the parameter adaptation laws are then solved analytically. Meanwhile, the explicit relationships between the steady accuracies of system states and the controller parameters are obtained via a Lyapunov-based approach. Numerical examples are simulated in a J 2-perturbed environment to validate the theoretical analyses. The results indicate that by using the proposed control schemes, underactuated reconfiguration in elliptic orbits is still feasible even in the absence of radial or in-track thrust and in the presence of unmatched disturbances.

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