Nowadays, space missions display communication needs shifting away from the pure telecommunication standpoint. Present (Martian exploration, formation flying) and future (Moon, inhabited flights to Mars) missions give clear indications that the era of space networks in its widest sense is dawning. Interplanetary Internet (IPN) was proposed to define the architecture and protocols necessary to p...

Bistatic radar is an active microwave sensor operating with separated transmitting and receiving antennae. This paper deals with a spaceborne mission of a bistatic synthetic aperture radar based on a small satellite flying in formation with ENVISAT along parallel orbits, and equipped with a receiving only microwave system, which catches the ASAR echoes. The proposed system does not require any ...

TanDEM-X is the first bistatic space borne SAR mission [1]. It is formed by adding a second, almost identical spacecraft to TerraSAR-X and flying them in a closely controlled formation with typical distances between 250 m and 500 m. The primary goal of the mission is the derivation of a high-precision global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) according to HRTI level 3 quality [2]. To achieve this ac...

The TPF Mission (Terrestrial Planet Finder) is one of the center pieces of the NASA Origins Program. The goal of TPF is to identify terrestrial planets around stars nearby the Solar System. For this purpose, a space-based infrared interferometer with a baseline of approximately 100 m is required. To achieve such a large baseline, a distributed system of five spacecraft flying in formation is an...

The post-optimality analysis of a tetrahedral formation flying optimal control problem is considered. In particular, this four-spacecraft orbit insertion problem is transcribed to a nonlinear programming problem (NLP) using a direct method called the Gauss pseudospectral method. The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions for this NLP are then derived and are compared to the conditions obtained via...

This paper presents an anlysis based on the momentum conservation equations of a redundant free-flying spacecraft/manipulator system, acting in zero-gravity environment. In order to follow a predefined end-effector path, the inverse kinematics at velocity level is considered. The redundancy i solved alternatively in terms of pseudoinverses and null-space components of the manipulator inertia ma...

This paper presents the preliminary mission and science analysis of a new concept for large scale, low-cost exploration Near Earth Objects (NEOs). The is to enable close range observations NEOs by performing flybys series at one their nodal points, with pairs small spacecraft flying in formation. assessment accessible asteroids multi-target tour trajectories from data available JPL small-body d...

We, the authors, wish to make following corrections our paper [...]

To maximize the profitability of modern satellites, designers must invest their spacecraft with both capability and reliability. On-board, autonomous software holds the promise of greatly enhancing spacecraft abilities, yet software glitches have been directly to blame for recent, highly publicized failures. This paper presents the flight-software development framework created for the Generaliz...