Spacecraft autonomy has the potential for effecting significant cost savings in mission operations by reducing the need for dedicated ground staff. In an autonomous operating mode, operators will communicate only highlevel goals and deadlines directly to the spacecraft. The spacecraft will then perform its own planning and scheduling, decomposing a goal into a set of sub-goals to be achieved wi...

0

An exotic spacecraft propulsion technology is described which exploits parity violation in weak interactions. Anisotropic neutrino emission from a polarized assembly of weakly interacting particles converts rest mass directly to spacecraft impulse.

Autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations between a chaser spacecraft and a target space object, consist of autonomous controlled approach and controlled docking with or controlled capture of the target by the chaser. Guidance, navigation and control problems during autonomous rendezvous and proximity maneuvers between spacecraft are challenging, particularly when the target spacecraft or ...

A new laboratory test bed is introduced that enables the hardware-in-the-loop simulation of the autonomous approach and docking of a chaser spacecraft to a target spacecraft of similar mass. The test bed consists of a chaser spacecraft and a target spacecraft simulator floating via air pads on a flat floor. The prototype docking interface mechanism of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agen...

* Principal Investigator, High-Throughput Distributed Spacecraft Network and SpaceVPN projects. Abstract BBN Technologies (BBN), under a task for the Space Communications Project, designed the HighThroughput Distributed Spacecraft Network, or HiDSN. It provides a self-forming vertically integrated network infrastructure for establishing and maintaining high-throughput multi-hop communications a...

Abstruct-Formation flying is defined as a set of more than one spacecraft whose states are coupled through a common control law. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of spacecraft formation flying control (FFC), which encompasses design techniques and stability results for these coupled-state control laws. We divide the FFC literature into five FFC architectures: (i) Multiple-Input Multip...

The terminal navigation of the NEAR spacecraft during its close flyby of asteroid 253 Mathilde involved coordinated efforts first to determine the heliocentric orbits of the spacecraft and Mathilde and then to determine the relative trajectory of the spacecraft with respect to Mathilde. From ground-based optical observations alone, the error of Mathilde’s ephemeris at the time of encounter was ...

T he dynamics and control of spacecraft have been widely studied because of their technological significance [1]–[3]. For single-axis rotation, a rigid spacecraft can sometimes be viewed as a double integrator with torque input [4]. Three-dimensional rotation is more complex and involves three-axis torque inputs provided by thrusters with attitude and rate sensing. The problem becomes more diff...

The Distributed Spacecraft Attitude Control System Simulator (DSACSS) testbed at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University facilitates investigation of various control strategies for single and multiple spacecraft. DSACSS is comprised of two independent hardware-in-the-loop simulators and one software spacecraft simulator. The two hardware-in-theloop spacecraft simulators have similar...