Tuned mass damper on spacecraft reaction wheel assembly

•Theoretical analysis of the bearing rotation and gyroscopic influence on the time-varying property of RWA micro-vibration.•Feasibility of the Tuned Mass Damper (TMD) applied to multi-modal RWA with variable stiffness and damping.•Numerical models and experiments are demonstrated to analyze the influence of TMD design parameters of on RWA.•Normalized amplitude-frequency responses is proposed to eliminate the influence of non-linear factors.