Continuous maneuvers for spacecraft formation flying reconfiguration using relative orbit elements

Energy Suboptimal Collision-Free Reconfiguration for Spacecraft Formation Flying

Precise Relative Positioning of Formation Flying Spacecraft using GPS

Cover illustration: Illustration of the viewing geometry for relative spacecraft positioning using differ-enced GPS observations. Contents Acknowledgements ix Important Acronyms xi Summary xiii Samenvatting (Summary in Dutch) xv 1 Introduction 1 1.

Vision-based Relative Navigation for Formation Flying of Spacecraft

The objective of this paper is to develop a robust and efficient approach for relative navigation and attitude estimation of spacecraft flying in formation. The approach developed here uses information from a new optical sensor that provides a line of sight vector from the master spacecraft to the secondary satellite. The overall system provides a novel, reliable, and autonomous relative naviga...

Decentralized Relative Attitude Estimation for Three-Spacecraft Formation Flying Applications

This paper investigates the problem of relative spacecraft attitude estimation between three vehicles from a decentralized point of view. Decentralized attitude estimation is achieved through the use of local extended Kalman filters and a data fusion process known as the Covariance Intersection algorithm. Because the global attitude parameterization is the quaternion, the Covariance Intersectio...

Decentralized Estimation Algorithms for Formation Flying Spacecraft

Several space missions are being planned with large fleets of spacecraft at GEO and beyond where relative navigation using GPS will either be impossible or insufficient. Onboard local ranging devices will be required to replace or augment the available GPS measurements to perform relative navigation for these missions. The vast amounts of distributed data and the computational load limitations ...