We present the enabling concept and technology for a dual spacecraft formation-flying optical interferometer, to be launched into a deep space orbit as Space Technology 3. The combiner spacecraft makes use of a nested cat’s eye delay line configuration that minimizes wavefront distortion and stores 20 m of optical pathlength in a package of ∼ 1.5 m length. A parabolic trajectory for the seconda...

An Adaptive Control Approach to Satellite Formation Flying With Relative Distance Constraints Jonathan Lawton Randal W. Beard Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Brigham Young University Fred Y. Hadaegh Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Abstract In this paper we present a spacecraft control for rigid eet rotations. This is done by creating a eet template wh...

The stability of spacecraft attitude is studied with considering sinusoidal disturbance. A passive attitude controller without angular velocity measurement for spacecraft described by quaternion is designed. The passive controller has no information related to system parameters. So it has robustness to model error and uncertainty of model parameters. The stability of spacecraft attitude control...

This article contains a description of main ideas for the attitude reorientation of spacecraft (small dual-spin spacecraft, nanosatellites) using properties of its chaotic attitude motion under the action of internal perturbations. The considering method based on intentional initiations of chaotic modes of the attitude motion with big amplitudes of the nutation oscillations, and also on the red...

A spacecraft simulation environment was developed for testing distributed spacecraft flight software (FSW) designed for autonomous coordinated control of a spacecraft cluster. The Cluster Flight Application (CFA) FSW was developed by Emergent Space Technologies in support of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) System F6 Program. The CFA provides cluster flight guidance, naviga...

Multiple Solar Electric Propulsion Technology Demonstration Mission were developed to assess vehicle performance and estimated mission cost. Concepts ranged from a 10,000 kg spacecraft capable of delivering 4000 kg of payload to one of the Earth Moon Lagrange points in support of future human-crewed outposts to a 180 kg spacecraft capable of performing an asteroid rendezvous mission after launc...

Modeling improvements of nonconservative forces affectingMars-orbiting spacecraft are presented in this study. Recent high-resolution gravity fields enable the recovery of smaller signals in the radio tracking data, previously obscured bymismodeled gravitational anomalies. In particular, the estimation of the atmospheric drag experienced by the spacecraft benefits from the new forcemodels.More ...