Development of an Air-Bearing Inclinable Turntable for Testing Tether Deployment

This research aims to develop an Earth based experimental environment which can imitate the deployment and libration behavior of tethered satellites in orbit. The experiment employs an air-bearing inclinable turntable to simulate the same forces the tethered satellites would experience in orbit. Appropriate scaling factors are developed for the various forces acting on the satellite in the experiment as well as for physical experimental parameters including the length of the tether, the mass of the daughter satellite and the deployment speed, in order to compare the behavior of the tethered system in the experiment to that in orbit.