In this paper, we study the minimum time planar tilting maneuver of a
spacecraft, from the theoretical as well as from the numerical point of view,
with a particular focus on the chattering phenomenon. We prove that there exist
optimal chattering arcs when a singular junction occurs. Our study is based on
the Pontryagin Maximum Principle and on results by M.I. Zelikin and V.F.
Borisov. We give sufficient conditions on the initial values under which the
optimal solutions do not contain any singular arc, and are bang-bang with a
finite number of switchings. Moreover, we implement sub-optimal strategies by
replacing the chattering control with a fixed number of piecewise constant
controls. Numerical simulations illustrate our results.Comment: 43 pages, 18 figure
