Clusters of low-performance spacecraft flying in formation may provide enhanced performance over single high-performance spacecraft. This is especially true for remote sensing missions where interferometry or stereographic imaging may provide higher resolution data. The configuration of such formations vary during an orbit due to orbital dynamics, and over larger time scales due to perturbation...

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Formation flying is an enabling technology for many future space missions. This thesis addresses some of the key dynamics and control issues expected in future missions by pursuing two areas of advancement: extensions of relative linear dynamics models and assessment and mitigation of sensor noise effects on control systems. Relative dynamics models play an important role in finding drift-free ...

We develop a non-linear tracking control law to be applied to formation flying spacecraft. Each spacecraft in the formation is modeled as a rigid body with N axisymmetric wheels controlled by axial torques, and the kinematics are represented by Modified Rodriques Parameters (MRPs). The paper first derives the open-loop reference attitude, rate, and acceleration commands for tracking a moving ob...

This paper focuses on the design of autonomous and collaborative control strategies to govern the relative distances among multiple spacecraft in formation with no ground intervention. A coordinate load-sharing control structure for formation flying and a methodology to control their dynamic models with slow t ime-varymg and uncertain parameters are the main objectives of this work. The method ...

The concept of flying an occulting shade in formation with an orbiting space telescope to enable astronomical imaging of faint targets while blocking out background noise primarily from starlight near distant Earth-like planets has been studied in various forms over the past decade. Recent analysis has shown that this approach may offer comparable performance to that provided by a space-based c...

This is the second in a series of papers that exploit the physical coupling of tethered spacecraft to derive a propellant-free spin-up and attitude control strategy. We take a nonlinear control approach to underactuated tethered formation flying spacecraft, whose lack of full state feedback linearizability, along with their complex nonholonomic behavior, characterizes the difficult nonlinear co...

The recent addition of autonomous formation flying spacecraft to the world's satellite fleet provides new motivation to study feedback control techniques. In this thesis, we develop nonlin-ear orbit control laws for use in spacecraft orbital maneuvers, and spacecraft formation flying. We apply these new control laws to a number of sample maneuvers, including formation establishment and formatio...

PRISMA will demonstrate Guidance, Navigation, and Control strategies for advanced autonomous formation flying. The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) is the prime contractor for the project which is funded by the Swedish National Space Board (SNSB). The mission consists of two spacecraft: MAIN and TARGET. The MAIN satellite has full orbit control capability while TARGET is attitude controlled only...

A revolution in spacecraft guidance, navigation and control technology has started with GPS to autonomously provide spacecraft position, attitude and time information. This new technology is being applied to spacecraft constellations to achieve the precision formation flying required for many proposed science and commercial missions. These innovations will also result in significant reductions ...