Despite the interest in formation flying and cubesats over something like the last decade or so, close controlled formation flying of two cubesat size spacecraft has not been achieved. Similarly, despite the growing interest in propulsion systems for cubesats, there are very few commercially available and flight ready systems. If these are coupled with the realization that formation flying coul...

Autonomous navigation methods for spacecraft formation flying in cislunar space Sergio Bonaccorsi Abstract. Due to the increasing number of deep missions following years, focus on and strategies that enable a perform critical operations autonomously is becoming crucial. In context space, this research aims investigate […]

Abstract—In this paper, the problem of fault detection and isolation in the attitude control subsystem of spacecraft formation flying is considered. In order to design the fault detection method, an extended Kalman filter is utilized which is a nonlinear stochastic state estimation method. Three fault detection architectures, namely, centralized, decentralized, and semi-decentralized are design...

For the improvement of accuracy and better faulttolerant performance, a global position system (GPS)/vision navigation (VISNAV) integrated relative navigation and attitude determination approach is presented for ultra-close spacecraft formation flying. Onboard GPS and VISNAV system are adopted and a federal Kalman filter architecture is used for the total navigation system design. Simulation re...

In this paper, a nonlinear trajectory control algorithm of rendezvous with maneuvering target spacecraft is presented. The disturbance forces on the chaser and target spacecraft and the thrust forces on the chaser spacecraft are considered in the analysis. The control algorithm developed in this paper uses the relative distance and relative velocity between the target and chaser spacecraft as t...

Flux-Pinned Interfaces are a developing technology for spacecraft that exploit flux pinning, a phenomenon in superconducting physics, to manipulate the dynamics between two spacecraft modules. Flux pinning occurs in certain types of superconductors which, when cooled below their critical temperature, will resist changes to the distribution of magnetic flux that was present during the temperatur...