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Reaction control systems are capable of providing small amounts of thrust in any desired direction or combination of directions. An RCS is also capable of providing torque to allow control of rotation (roll, pitch, and yaw). [2] Reaction control systems often use combinations of large and small thrusters, to allow different levels of response.
A thruster is a spacecraft propulsion device used for orbital station-keeping, attitude control, or long-duration, low-thrust acceleration, often as part of a reaction control system.
The second passive system orients the satellite along Earth's magnetic field thanks to a magnet. [7] These purely passive attitude control systems have limited pointing accuracy, because the spacecraft will oscillate around energy minima. This drawback is overcome by adding damper, which can be hysteretic materials or a viscous damper.
A small reaction wheel viewed in profile A momentum/reaction wheel comprising part of a high-accuracy Conical Earth Sensor to maintain a satellite's precise attitude. A reaction wheel (RW) is an electric motor attached to a flywheel, which, when its rotation speed is changed, causes a counter-rotation proportionately through conservation of angular momentum. [1]
Ullage is often a secondary function of the reaction control system such as on the Apollo Lunar Module (LM). In his book Lost Moon , Jim Lovell recounted a description of a course-correction burn of the LEM's main descent engine to re-enter a free return trajectory to Earth during the successful recovery of the Apollo 13 capsule:
Depending on the design of a craft's maneuvering and stability systems, it may simply be a smaller thruster complementing the main propulsion system, [1] or it may complement larger attitude control thrusters, [2] or may be a part of the reaction control system.
Bell designed and built the Reaction Control system for Project Mercury's Redstone command module and a similar system was incorporated into the North American X-15 spaceplane. NASA selected Bell to develop and built the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) , three of which were built in the early 1960s to train the Apollo astronauts to land ...
The only remedy for this loss of control is to desaturate the CMGs by removing the excess angular momentum from the spacecraft. The simplest way of doing this is to use reaction control system (RCS) thrusters. In our example of saturation along the forward axis, the RCS will be fired to produce an anticlockwise torque about that axis.